Shaun W. Bridges has pleaded guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice in federal court in San Francisco this Monday, the Los Angeles Times reports.

According to prosecutors, in January 2013 the special agent investigating the Silk Road case used his position to get control over several Silk Road accounts. He then transferred nearly 20,000 bitcoin (worth about $350,000 at the time) to an account at Mt. Gox, a Japanese bitcoin exchange platform. Two months later Bridges sold these bitcoins for $820,000 and transferred the money to a personal investment account in the United States.

Shaun W. Bridges, 32, was a part of a Baltimore-based federal task force working on the Silk Road case. One of his colleagues, former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Mark Force IV, pleaded guilty to extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice in July 2015. He admitted stealing more than $200,000 worth of bitcoins, extorting money from Ross Ulbricht and sending him classified information about the investigation.

U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag noted:

“We depend on those in federal law enforcement having the highest integrity and unshakeable honor, and Mr. Bridges has demonstrated that he utterly lacks those qualities.”

Earlier this year, the news about the involvement of federal officials in a bitcoin theft provoked uproar in the bitcoin community. Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, was convicted of seven charges including money laundering, drug trafficking, and computer hacking, and sentenced in May 2015 to a life imprisonment. His lawyer suggested that the misdeeds of the two federal agents were not made public before Ulbricht’s conviction to avoid influencing the jury. He also stated that those charges removed “any question about the corruption that pervaded the investigation of Silk Road”.

Nadya Krasnushkina