The former secret agent who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars during an investigation into illegal drug purchases on Silk Road is now suspected of stealing even more cryptocurrency from two other cases.
Shaun Bridges is one of two former US agents who pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced in December to nearly six years in prison for stealing more than $800,000 in Bitcoin while investigating the darknet market.
Bridges and his partner stole money from Silk Road accounts and blamed someone else for it, which led Silk Road's head, Ross Ulbricht, to commit murder.
Ulbricht is now in prison.
Ulbricht was convicted in February 2015 of operating Silk Road.
According to court documents unsealed Thursday, Bridges is believed to have stolen additional funds from a secret agency account.
Bridges and 46-year-old former special agent Carl Force were part of the Baltimore-based task force investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road marketplace.
The Justice Department became aware in April of last year that Bridges had likely kept a private encryption key to gain access to a Bitcoin wallet.
The Justice Department asked the Secret Service to move the funds to a different online wallet, but when the Secret Service was able to access the wallet, all of the bitcoins were gone.
The stolen bitcoins were recovered by the agency in December, when Bridges admitted to stealing nearly 20,000 Bitcoins and was convicted.
Bridges later liquidated the stolen Bitcoins to $820,000 and transferred all the funds to his personal investment accounts in the United States.
