Nearly 18 months after the online drug marketplace Silk Road was shut down, the criminal prosecution continues. This time, it appears that the defendants are not the online drug dealers but two agents who participated in the investigation. DEA Special Agent Carl Force and Secret Service Special Agent Shaun Bridges have been arrested and charged with online fraud and money laundering.
Bridges is accused of depositing $800,000 of Silk Road's bitcoins into a personal account at the Mt. Gox exchange. But Shaun Bridges' charges "pale in comparison" to the charges against the DEA, who is accused of theft of government assets and conflict of interest in the Silk Road investigation.
Carl Force allegedly obtained hundreds of thousands in Bitcoin from Silk Road payments as part of his undercover investigation and transferred them to a personal account rather than seizing them as government assets. He has also been accused of secretly working for Bitcoin exchange CoinMKT, using DEA powers to seize funds from the exchange, and later using a subpoena to the payment company Venmo to try to unlock frozen funds, Wired reports.
The biggest surprise of all the charges against Force, however, is that he acted as a paid informant for Silk Road administrator Ross Ulbricht, allegedly selling information about the investigation into Ulbricht under two different aliases. Meanwhile, using a third alias, Force is also accused of trying to blackmail Ulbricht using data in the hands of authorities.
Force, a 46-year-old man, had been working undercover as a member of the Silk Road Baltimore task force since 2012, communicating directly with Ulbricht, who allegedly used the alias Dread Pirate Roberts. In that role, Force also played “Nob,” a fictional criminal who helped orchestrate the murder of Curtis Clark Green for Ulbricht. That hit-and-run never happened, but it’s important to know that it was orchestrated by the Baltimore task force. The assassination attempt was allegedly paid for by Ulbricht to keep Green, a potential witness, from speaking out. The murder is the first in a series of six murders that prosecutors are charging Ulbricht with.
The lawsuit against Force and Bridges includes a detailed written affidavit from IRSTigran Gambaryan.
