WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- The Department of Justice announced a Secret Service agent was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for money laundering and obstruction of justice related to a larger Silk Road investigation.
Shaun W. Bridges, 33, of Laurel, Md., received a prison sentence of 71 months Monday in San Francisco after pleading guilty to one count of money laundering and one count of obstructing justice. He was a former member of the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road covert online marketplace often used to sell drugs.
Bridges was responsible for conducting forensic computer investigations to identify and locate suspects, including Ross Ulbricht, alias Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran the underground marketplace from California.
"As part of his guilty plea, 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," the Justice Department wrote in a statement.
Ulbricht attempted to kill Green after learning Green's access to Silk Road was used to transfer bitcoin currency, according to the Justice Department. Bridges also admitted to making multiple false and misleading statements to cover up his tracks.
"Bridges admitted that he moved the stolen bitcoin into an account at Mt. Gox, an online digital currency exchange based in Japan, and that 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," the Justice Department writes. "In June 2014, Bridges transferred money from the investment account into a personal bank account that he shared with another person."
Bridges is the second federal agent sentenced in connection to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force's investigation into the online black marketplace.
Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Carl M. Force, 46, of Baltimore, was sentenced to 78 months in prison after he pleaded guilty in July to counts of obstruction of justice, money laundering with predicates of wire fraud and theft of government property and extortion under color of official right.
Force stole more than $700,000 in bitcoin digital currency while working undercover for the investigation, the Justice Department said.
