Carl Force, the former agent with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has followed the footsteps of his United States Secret Service counterpart Shaun Bridges in the Silk Road case.
While being part of the Silk Road investigation, Carl Force was involved in the theft of bitcoins from the deep web marketplace. Force and another federal agent Bridges were charged with theft of bitcoins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. While Bridges agreed to plead guilty of the charges against him, Force has now come forward to plead guilty for his alleged crimes. According to the papers filed in the Federal Court of San Francisco, he has agreed to plead guilty on the charges of money laundering, extortion and obstruction of justice on July 1.
READ MORE: One of the Feds to Plead Guilty for Stealing Bitcoins from Silk Road
During the course of investigation against Silk Road and its creator Ross Ulbricht better known by the name of Dread Pirate Roberts on the deep web Carl Force had successfully attempted to negotiate and extort the target. Force, under the alias “French Maid” had passed on information about the ongoing investigation to Ross Ulbricht for a sum of $98,000 in bitcoins. While he had reported his earlier interaction with Ross under the alias of “Nob”, he had kept this one under wraps. In his previous interaction, he had convinced Ross to pay $50,000 worth of bitcoins and never reported the exchange of money for information. Both these exchanges happened in August and September 2013 respectively.
According to the prosecutors, Force gained another $297,000 worth of bitcoins after he kept the bitcoins from the customer’s account he ordered to be frozen at one of the bitcoin exchanges. Overall Force managed to steal close to $450,000 during the course of investigation whereas Bridges stole almost twice as much while being part of the Baltimore Task Force tasked to investigate Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht.
In a recent judgement, Ross was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in creating and operating the online drug marketplace – Silk Road on the deep web.