Nearly 18 months after the Silk Road online drug market was shut down, criminal charges continue. This time it seems that the defendants are not the online drug dealers but two agents who participated in the research. Her special agent DEA, Carl Force and her specialist agent Secret Service Shaun Bridges are arrested and accused of online scams and money laundering.
Bridges is accused of depositing $ 800.000 in Silk Road bitcoins in a personal Mt. Gox. But Shaun Bridges' allegations "pale in comparison to the charges against her agent DEA", Who is accused of theft of state assets and conflict of interest in the context of the Silk Road investigation.
Carl Force allegedly obtained hundreds of thousands in Bitcoins from Silk Road payments as part of his undercover investigation and transferred them to a personal account instead of confiscating them by naming them government assets. He has also been accused of secretly working for her company Bitcoin exchange CoinMKT, and using DEA powers to seize the exchange's funds, later using a subpoena on payment company Venmo to try to unlock frozen funds, Wired reports.
But the biggest surprise of all the charges against Force is that he acted as a paid informant for Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht, allegedly selling information for the investigation they were conducting on Ulbricht under two different aliases. Meanwhile, using a third alias, Force is also accused of trying to blackmail Ulbricht using data in the authorities' possession.
Force, a 46-year-old, worked secretly as a Silk Road member on the Baltimore Task Force since 2012, communicating directly with Ulbricht, who allegedly used the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. With this role, Force also "played" him as "Nob", a virtual criminal who helped organize the murder of Curtis Clark Green for Ulbricht. This assassination never happened, but it is important to know that it was organized by the Baltimore task force. The assassination attempt was allegedly paid for by Ulbricht to prevent Green, a potential witness, from speaking. The murder is the first in a series of six murders that prosecutors accuse of Ulbricht.
The lawsuit against Force and Bridges includes a detailed written affidavit from his agent IRS, Tigran Gambaryan.
