A former National Criminal Agency (NCA) Officer was recently sentenced to five and a half years in prison after it was discovered that he stole 50 bitcoins from Silk Road 2.0 founder Thomas White while helping on the investigation. According to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the public prosecutor in England and Wales, Paul Chowles was part of the NCA team investigating Mr. White after he founded the dark web marketplace.
White was arrested in 2014 and had his crypto holdings seized, but between May 6 and 7, 2017, 50 Bitcoins — now worth around $6 million — mysteriously disappeared from Thomas’s wallet. The authorities assumed that this was White’s doing and tried to follow the crypto trail. But by 2021, the investigators had given up on it and simply thought that it was no longer traceable due to White’s use of the cryptocurrency mixing service Bitcoin Fog — a tool many criminals favor for laundering their illicit gains.
However, during the investigation, White himself noticed the 50 missing Bitcoins and told the authorities about it. He said that only someone from the NCA could have accessed his wallet, since the investigating team held his private key. This led the Merseyside Police to coordinate with the NCA — even setting a meeting that Chowles himself attended — where they discovered that 50 Bitcoins were indeed stolen.
The revelation made the NCA suspect that there was a mole among them. One of the officers caught in the investigative agency’s crosshairs was Chowles himself, especially as he was the lead analyst during the Silk Road 2.0 investigation. Because of this, he was one of those who had the capability to covertly move cryptocurrency and had access to White’s seized devices. He was arrested in May 2022, and during the proceedings, investigators discovered an iPhone that connects Chowles to the account used to move the Bitcoin. More importantly, the police discovered notebooks that listed usernames, passwords, and statements related to Thomas White's cryptocurrency accounts hidden in Chowles’ office..
By the time of his arraignment, the evidence against Chowles was so heavy that he pleaded guilty to theft, transferring criminal property, and concealing criminal property. This landed him a 66-month sentence, and he was also subsequently fired from the agency.
“Within the NCA, Paul Chowles was regarded as someone who was competent, technically minded, and very aware of the dark web and cryptocurrencies. He took advantage of his position working on this investigation by lining his own pockets while devising a plan that he believed would ensure that suspicion would never fall upon him,” said CPS Specialist Prosecutor Alex Johnson. “Once he had stolen the cryptocurrency, Paul Chowles sought to muddy the waters and cover his tracks by transferring the Bitcoin into mixing services to help hide the trail of money. He made a large amount of money through his criminality, and it is only right that he is punished for his corrupt actions.”
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