Former NCA officials were sentenced to pay £1.81 million for stealing 50 bitcoins

According to Decrypt, the UK's Crown Prosecution Service obtained a confiscation order under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, requiring 44-year-old Paul Chowles, a former officer of the National Crime Agency (NCA) from Bristol, to repay £1,810,678.93, approximately $2.4 million.

This amount is related to the 50 bitcoins he stole, which were worth about £60,000, or approximately $77,000, when he took them in 2017. Of the 50 bitcoins, 30 have been recovered, and the Crown Prosecution Service attributes the difference between the two amounts to the appreciation of bitcoin since 2017.

Chowles was involved in the NCA's investigation of the dark web market Silk Road 2, responsible for analyzing and extracting cryptocurrency from the devices involved. In May 2017, he transferred 50 bitcoins from Thomas White's reserve wallet over two days, splitting them into smaller amounts and transferring them through the bitcoin mixing service Bitcoin Fog, and cashed out a total of £144,580 through 279 transactions using Cryptopay and Wirex debit cards.

For years, this theft was attributed to White, who has always denied it, and by the end of 2021, the missing bitcoins were listed as untraceable. In 2022, devices containing private keys were found during a search of Chowles' residence, and the Merseyside police, with the assistance of Chainalysis, traced the flow of funds.