Shaun Bridges and story of 20,000 BTC

In 2013 Shaun Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland was a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service and was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency team investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road. Among the targets of the Task Force was Ross Ulbricht, a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts,” who was prosecuted for his involvement with the Silk Road.

Bridges admitted he used an administrator account to reset passwords and pins of various accounts on the Silk Road. This enabled Bridges to move bitcoin into a “wallet” he controlled and which he used to fraudulently move and steal approximately 20,000 bitcoin from Silk Road accounts. At the time Bridges stole the bitcoin in January 2013, 20,000 bitcoin would have been worth approximately $350,000 then and $960,000,000 today. Shortly after Bridges stole the bitcoin, he moved it into an account at Mt. Gox, an online digital currency exchange based in Japan.

Between March and May of 2013, he liquidated the bitcoin into $820,000 of U.S. currency and had the funds transferred to the United States to a personal investment account at Fidelity. He owned the Fidelity account under the name of Quantum International Investments, LLC. Later, in June 2014, Bridges transferred money from the Quantum Fidelity account into a personal bank account that he shared with another person.

On June 16, 2015, Bridges was charged by information with money laundering.