Third Silk Road investigator caught stealing seized Bitcoin owes UK £1.8M

A UK court has ordered former National Crime Agency (NCA) officer Paul Chowles to repay £1,810,678.93, roughly 30 times what the Bitcoin was worth when he lifted it from a stash his own agency had seized. 

Chowles, 44, is at least the third investigator tied to the Silk Road cases to be caught stealing the cryptocurrency he was supposed to be tracking. 

How much will Paul Chowles be required to pay? 

Back in 2017, Paul Chowles, who worked as an officer for the National Crime Agency, stole coins worth about £60,000, or $77,000. Bitcoin’s price has risen impressively since the theft, and now Chowles is due to pay a seven-figure bill of £1,810,678.93. 

The coins in question were seized from Thomas White, a dark-web operator, during a joint operation between the NCA and the FBI against Silk Road 2.0. White created the marketplace within weeks of the FBI putting an end to the original Silk Road in 2013. 

White received a 64-month sentence in April 2019, and Chowles led the technical work, pulling data and crypto off the devices seized from him. 

Fifty of the 97 Bitcoin taken from White’s “retirement wallet” vanished over two days in May 2017 and were pushed through the Bitcoin Fog mixer to bury the trail. 

Investigators first assumed White had moved them himself, and by late 2021, the loss was written off as untraceable. White insisted otherwise, telling investigators the only people who could have done it were inside the NCA, since the agency held his private keys. 

A Merseyside Police investigation eventually traced the coins to Chowles, who was jailed for five and a half years in July 2025 after admitting theft, transferring criminal property, and concealing criminal property. He was dismissed from the NCA on 11 July 2025.

Notably, Carl Force, a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent on the Baltimore task force that ran the original Silk Road probe, was sentenced to 78 months in prison in 2015 for stealing Bitcoin during that investigation and extorting the site’s operator. 

Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges also got served for taking about $820,000 in Bitcoin from the same case. 

How much will the state get from Chowles?

Of the 50 stolen coins, 30 were recovered from Chowles. The confiscation order announced Wednesday was made under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Merseyside Police put the direct benefit from the theft at £613,147.29 back in 2025.

Luke Clements, a specialist prosecutor in the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division, said that Chowles exploited his privileged position for personal gain. A compensation order has been made for the victim in the case, but the money will go toward White’s outstanding confiscation total. 

Separately, UK authorities are holding more than 61,000 Bitcoin seized in 2018 from a money-laundering operation linked to Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in November 2025. 

Cryptopolitan reported the haul at about $6.8 billion. Notably, the coins were worth a fraction of that when seized.

In July, the UK High Court spent three days weighing whether British or Chinese law would decide who gets the appreciation. UK law could let roughly 16,000 Chinese fraud victims claim property rights over the coins and their gains, while Chinese law would cap their recovery at principal and interest. 

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.