CALIFORNIA
A federal judge sentenced former Secret Service Agent Shaun W. Bridges, 33, of Laurel, Maryland, in San Francisco, to nearly six years in prison after Bridges plead guilty to one count of money laundering and one count of obstructing justice, according to officials.
The crimes were committed while he was working as an undercover agent investigating Silk Road, an online marketplace used to facilitate the sale and purchase of illegal drugs and other contraband, according to authorities.
U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg also ordered Bridges to forfeit $651,000.
Between 2012 and 2014, Bridges was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road, a covert online marketplace for illicit goods, primarily drugs.
Bridges’s responsibilities included, among other things, conducting forensic computer investigations in an effort to locate, identify and prosecute targets, including Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran the Silk Road from North California.
As part of his guilty plea, officials said Bridges admitted to using account information that he obtained during the January 2013 search and arrest of Curtis Green, a customer support representative on Silk Road, to reset passwords and pins of various accounts on Silk Road and move approximately 20,000 bitcoin, at the time worth approximately $350,000, from those accounts into a bitcoin “wallet” that Bridges controlled.
When Ulbricht learned that Green’s access to Silk Road had been used to transfer bitcoin from Silk Road into a wallet, Ulbricht cancelled Green’s administrator access to Silk Road and attempted to have him killed in retaliation for the bitcoin thefts, according to authorities.
Bridges admitted that he moved the stolen bitcoin into an account at Mt. Gox, an online digital currency exchange based in Japan. Between March and May 2015, he liquidated the bitcoin into $820,000 in U.S. currency and had the funds transferred to a personal investment account in the United States, officials said.
In June 2014, Bridges transferred money from the investment account into a personal bank account that he shared with another person.
Authorities said Bridges also admitted that he used Green’s access to Silk Road to steal bitcoin from the site, thereby limiting Green’s access to further the Baltimore grand jury investigation of Ulbricht and Silk Road.
Additionally, officials said Bridges admitted that he made multiple false and misleading statements to both prosecutors and investigators in connection with the San Francisco grand jury investigation into his own illegal acts.
Bridges is the second of two federal agents to be sentenced in connection with the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force’s investigation into the Silk Road.
Carl M. Force, 46, of Baltimore, was a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration who plead guilty on July 1, 2015, to a three-count information charging him with money laundering with predicates of wire fraud and theft of government property, obstruction of justice and extortion under color of official right, related to his theft and diversion of more than $700,000 in digital currency to which he gained control as part of undercover role on the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force.
On Oct. 19, 2015, Judge Seeborg sentenced Force to six years and six months in prison, officials said.