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.
