The notorious ex-Secret Service agent Shaun W. Bridges, convicted in December and sentenced to six years in prison, is now suspected of stealing bitcoin in at least two more cases.

Bridges is accused of the theft of $700,000 worth of bitcoin from a Secret Service account, reports Reuters. According to the court filings, in April 2015 when Bridges was already unmasked, the Justice Department learned that he might have kept a private cryptographic key giving him access to the Secret Service bitcoin wallet with Silk Road assets seized in 2014. The Secret Service was urged to move the funds elsewhere but paid no heed to these warnings. In July 2015, the money was stolen but the Secret Service became aware of this theft only in December – “once it was ordered by a court to pay a portion of the seizure back to affected claimants,” says the team of prosecutors.

While participating in the federal investigation of the bitcoin black market Silk Road, Shaun W. Bridges together with his colleague, Carl Mark Force IV from the Drug Enforcement Administration, used his expertise in cryptocurrency to steal bitcoins and launder them at the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. On 7 December 2015, found guilty of money laundering and obstruction of justice, he was sentenced to 71 months in prison and three years of supervised release after serving the term. He also promised to repay $1.1 million of stolen money. His lawyers tried to reduce the sentence to three years in prison, citing his faultless 12-year service in the law enforcement.

Bridges was scheduled to begin his term in prison on 29 January. However, he was arrested the day before, on 28 January, on suspicion that he was seeking to flee the country. According to the prosecutors, they had found evidence suggesting he committed other crimes, both prior and after the date of his sentence.

Alexey Tereshchenko