Carl Mark Force IV, a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent who investigated the Silk Road case, has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for money laundering, obstruction of justice and extortion.

Force was a part of federal task force investigating Silk Road, based in Baltimore, Maryland. He worked undercover on the darknet marketplace trying to establish connection with the site administration and Dread Pirate Roberts, the Silk Road mastermind, himself. However he also took some unauthorised personalities, namely “Death From Above” and “French Maid”, which he used for an unsuccessful attempt to extort from Dread Pirate Roberts and for selling him “law enforcement counter-intel”.



The defence insisted Force was suffering from mental illness at the time he committed his crimes. Force’s lawyer also asked the judge to consider his client’ family history of alcoholism and abuse and lighten the sentence to 48 months instead of 87 months requested by prosecutors.

However US District Judge Richard Seeborg pointed out that Force’s deprived childhood should not be regarded as a warrant, Ars Technica reports.



“The extent and the scope of Mr Force's betrayal of public trust is quite simply breathtaking. It is compounded by the fact that it appears to have been motivated by greed and thrill seeking, including the pursuit of a book and movie deal,” he said.



Force was also ordered to pay $337,000 in restitution to a customer of CoinMKT, identified as “RP”, from whom he had stolen $370,000, and $3,000 to a former Silk Road admin Curtis Green whom the agent had arrested.



Force pleaded guilty 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.



Later his colleague Shaun W. Bridges also pleaded guilty to using his position to get control over several Silk Road accounts and selling stolen bitcoins for $820,000. Bridges is to be sentenced in December.



Earlier this year the news about involvement of federal officials in a bitcoin theft provoked uproar in the bitcoin community. Ross Ulbricht, revealed to be the Dread Pirate Roberts, 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