A former National Crime Agency officer in the UK has been sentenced to prison for stealing 50 Bitcoins in the Silk Road 2.0 investigation.

On July 17, Cointelegraph reported that a former National Crime Agency (NCA) officer in the UK was sentenced to prison for stealing 50 Bitcoins during the investigation of Silk Road 2.0. Silk Road 2.0 is a successor to the original Silk Road, which went online a month after the FBI shut down the original Silk Road and arrested its founder Ross Ulbricht in October 2013, and was closed by the FBI a year later. NCA action officer Paul Chowles, who was involved in the investigation, was responsible for extracting and analyzing the device data of the Silk Road 2.0 co-founder during the law enforcement operation. At that time, 50 out of 97 Bitcoins seized in May 2017 were transferred, and these Bitcoins were subsequently processed through the crypto tumbler Bitcoin Fog, apparently to conceal their origin. Paul Chowles has currently pleaded guilty to charges of theft, transferring criminal property, and concealing criminal property, and was sentenced to more than five years in prison. The UK Crown Prosecution Service calculated that he illegally profited around £613,150 (approximately $821,345) from this.