“Once he had stolen the cryptocurrency, Paul Chowles sought to muddy the waters and cover his tracks by transferring the Bitcoin into mixing services to help hide the trail of money,” added Johnson. However, following an investigation by Merseyside Police, Chowles was discovered to have secretly accessed White’s wallet and attempted to launder the pilfered bitcoin through darkweb exchanges into other public addresses he controlled. “Police recovered an iPhone which linked Chowles to an account used to transfer Bitcoin as well as relevant browser search history relating to a cryptocurrency exchange service. When it became clear that one of the NCA’s own officers had stolen Bitcoin, our officers conducted extensive enquiries to unearth a trail of evidence that Chowles had attempted to hide. Paul Chowles, 42, was on Wednesday sentenced to five and a half years in prison by Liverpool Crown Court after previously pleading guilty to theft, transferring criminal property and concealing criminal property. Chowles had contributed to a joint investigation by the NCA and the FBI into the Silk Road marketplace which led to the arrest of Thomas White, a man from Liverpool, who launched Silk Road 2.0 shortly after the FBI shut down the original in 2013. The police found Chowles had also converted the bitcoin into cash using Cryptopay debit cards and said he had benefited in excess of £613,000 ($820,000) from the theft. Alex Johnson, a specialist prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Within the NCA, Paul Chowles was regarded as someone who was competent, technically minded and very aware of the dark web and cryptocurrencies. He was arrested in November 2014, when Chowles led the NCA’s work analyzing devices seized from White and extracting both data and cryptocurrency from those devices. Several notebooks were also discovered in Chowles’ office which contained usernames, passwords, and statements relating to White’s cryptocurrency accounts,” stated Merseyside Police.
This Cyber News was published on therecord.media. Publication date: Thu, 17 Jul 2025 14:05:16 +0000