Stolen Bitcoin from Silk Road drugs investigation turned detective into a millionaire

A former employee of the British National Crime Agency has been ordered to repay just over 2 million Euro after stealing Bitcoins that had been seized during a large-scale drugs investigation.

Paul Chowles, from Bristol, was handed a prison sentence of five and a half years after pleading guilty to theft and money laundering. The former detective abused his access to digital evidence during an investigation into criminal activity on the dark web.

Silk Road

Chowles was part of the team that analysed and secured cryptocurrencies during an investigation into Thomas White, a drug dealer active on the notorious darknet marketplace Silk Road 2.0. White was sentenced to 64 months in prison in 2019 for selling illegal goods to criminal networks.

During that investigation, the authorities seized 97 Bitcoins from White. It later emerged, however, that 50 of those coins had disappeared from the digital wallet. Initially the NCA believed White had gained access to the wallet himself from prison, but he denied any involvement.

Years later the truth came to light. It turned out that Chowles had transferred the Bitcoins to wallets under his control in 2017. He then tried to conceal the origin of the money through a series of complex transactions.

The fraud went unnoticed for years until Merseyside Police launched an investigation into the missing Bitcoins. That led to Chowles’s arrest in May 2022. In the end, the authorities were able to recover 30 Bitcoins.

The case took on an additional financial dimension thanks to the spectacular rise in the Bitcoin price. When the coins were stolen, the 30 recovered Bitcoins were worth around 40,000 Euro each. Today they are worth more than 2 million Euro.