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A retired intelligence officer with Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) was sentenced to five and a half years in jail for stealing cryptocurrency from a high-profile probe of an illegal dark web marketplace.
Paul Chowles, 42, was convicted of theft, the transfer of criminal property, and concealing criminal property after he swiped 50 bitcoin from Thomas White, a convicted operator of the Silk Road 2.0 website. The dark web platform had arisen after the FBI shut down the original Silk Road in 2013 and was being investigated by the NCA.
White, who is Liverpool-based, was arrested in 2014 and subsequently imprisoned in 2019 for more than five years. Chowles, in the course of the investigation, obtained the information of White’s so-called “retirement wallet” and illegally moved 50 bitcoin to a cryptocurrency mixing business, Bitcoin Fog, in a bid to cover the transaction.
The value of the stolen bitcoin at the time of the theft in May 2017 was close to £60,000 ($80,000). Prosecutors disclosed that the value had since climbed to over £4 million, although Chowles had exchanged only around £145,000.
At first, the NCA assumed that White had been able to reach his own crypto wallet from prison. But suspicions were aroused when White declined involvement, and Chowles’ notebooks were discovered with usernames and passwords associated with White’s accounts.
Chowles was arrested in 2022 and dismissed from the NCA for gross misconduct earlier this month following his guilty pleas. Judge David Aubrey, presiding over the Liverpool Crown Court, noted that nearly £470,000 in bitcoin had been recovered from Chowles, warning that “had you not been arrested, you would have continued to reap the rewards of your wrongdoing.”
The NCA had already recovered and sold 47 bitcoin from White’s account for £500,000, in addition to a £1.5 million confiscation order against him.
