16.07.2025
2 min
533
Paul Choles, an officer of the British National Crime Agency (NCA), was sentenced to 5.5 years in prison for stealing 50 bitcoins during the Silk Road 2.0 investigation. He used his official access to the criminal’s wallet and withdrew the assets through mixers, but the trace did not disappear from the blockchain.
Paul Choles, an NCA officer, worked on the Silk Road 2.0 investigation, where the main suspect was Thomas White, one of the administrators of the drug marketplace. In 2017, Choles gained access to White’s “retirement wallet,” which contained 97 BTC, and quietly transferred 50 bitcoins on the night of May 6-7. For four years, no one suspected the theft, and the loss was written off as irretrievable.
The breakthrough in the case came when White himself, already in custody, noticed that the funds had disappeared from the wallet, and suspicion fell on someone from the NCA. After an investigation, police found Choles’ iPhone with evidence, a history of requests to crypto services, password records and wallet data.
Choles withdrew the stolen cryptocurrency through Bitcoin Fog and P2P platforms, and then spent the money on crypto cards Cryptopay and Wirex, making hundreds of transactions worth over £100,000. Some of the funds were found in a “default wallet” that he had not used for years until the police found it during a search in 2022.
Silk Road 2.0 became one of the most high-profile cases on the dark web after the closure of the first Silk Road. Its administrator Thomas White was detained in 2014, but the investigation into the assets continued for many years. The involvement of the NCA was supposed to ensure transparency in the process, but Choles betrayed the system from the inside, taking advantage of the anonymity of cryptocurrency.
However, even the “mixers” did not save him – the company Chainalysis recreated the movement of coins in five stages, showing in detail the path of funds from crime to cash-out. Blockchain analysis was the key to the exposure.
The irony is that cryptocurrencies, which attract criminals with the promise of anonymity, eventually became the main evidence against the bribe-taking policeman. Blockchain is not only a tool of crime, but also a major source of truth that cannot be erased or faked. Choles’s case should be studied as a case study in cyberethics and the new criminology of the digital age.
