Another Silk Road spy pleaded guilty to laundering bitcoins
$820,000. That's how much former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges pilfered in bitcoin during his time investigating the online black market, Silk Road. Bridges pleaded guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice recently and the Department of Justice says that it was analyzing the "block chain and data" from Silk Road's servers that lead the breadcrumb trail of ill-gotten gains back to him. Bridges funneled his 20,000 bitcoins, at that time worth $350,000, through a series of "complex transactions" with a stop at Mt. Gox before transferring them into US dollars in early 2013. It isn't nearly as flagrant as his colleague Carl Force's transgressions (a movie deal? Seriously?), but the amount of money Bridges tried stealing was an awful lot higher.
As a lawyer for Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht, Dread Pirate Roberts, tells Reuters that the charges Bridges faces illustrate "the corruption that pervaded" the entire Silk Road saga. He isn't wrong, but since Ulbricht's defense team has filed some five requests for a mistrial to date, it's hard to take a lot of what he says seriously.
[Image credit: AFP/Getty Images]
