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- A aged British National Crime Company officer has been sentenced to over 5 years for stealing seized bitcoins
- Paul Chowles pleaded responsible to theft and money laundering tied to 50 BTC taken from a Silk Street 2.0 suspect and became sentenced to 5 and a half of years
- Authorities recovered part of the stolen crypto after the contemporary suspect reported the money lacking
A aged investigator with the UK’s National Crime Company (NCA), Paul Chowles, has been sentenced to 5 and a half of years in detention center after admitting to stealing 50 bitcoins from evidence seized in the Silk Street 2.0 case. Chowles faded his access to switch the bitcoins in 2017 thru a mixer to imprecise their origins and became most attention-grabbing caught years later when the contemporary suspect, Thomas White, reported the money lacking. A multi-three hundred and sixty five days investigation intriguing blockchain analytics eventually exposed Chowles because the thief, leading to his arrest, dismissal, and conviction.
Covert Theft Unraveled Years Later
Chowles became fragment of the team accountable for processing seized crypto resources linked to Silk Street 2.0 co-founder Thomas White. In Could perchance merely 2017, Chowles quietly transferred 50 BTC from White’s “retirement wallet,” sending the funds thru Bitcoin Fog to cloak the lunge. The lacking money went neglected unless White, under post-detention center supervision, flagged the anomaly, pointing out that most attention-grabbing someone with inner access and inner most keys will accept as true with performed the theft.
That tip sparked a covert inquiry, where investigators at Merseyside Police and the NCA worked alongside Chainalysis to mark the stolen funds thru mixing services and products and onto exchanges. Their forensic work uncovered Chowles’s involvement thru a aggregate of on-chain evidence, phone recordsdata, browser records, and handwritten notes learned in his put of enterprise that referenced White’s inner most keys.
Responsible Plea Lowered Sentence
Chowles pleaded responsible in Could perchance merely 2025 to theft and two counts of concealing prison property. At his sentencing in July, Come to a resolution David Aubrey acknowledged Chowles would accept as true with persevered to clutch pleasure in the theft had he now now not been caught. Prosecutors confirmed that virtually £470,000 of the stolen bitcoin has been recovered to this level, even though some stays unaccounted for. Crown Prosecution Provider specialist Alex Johnson properly-known that Chowles “made a gargantuan amount of money thru his criminal activity, and it is most attention-grabbing ethical that he’s punished for his imperfect actions.”
The case attracts parralels with those of aged Drug Enforcement Company officer Carl Force and aged Secret Provider agent Shaun Bridges, each of whom stole bitcoins price billions of greenbacks from the contemporary Silk Street investigation. Bridges and Force had been furthermore undone thru blockchain investigations and ended up spending time in detention center.
