DEA agent who stole from Silk Road—and extorted DPR—pleads guilty
Carl Force is the second of two feds arrested in March to plead guilty.
Carl Force, a DEA agent accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Silk Road drug-trafficking website while he investigated it, will plead guilty, according to court papers filed Monday.
Force is one of two federal agents who were arrested in March on charges of stealing from the Silk Road, then the Web’s largest drug-trafficking site. The other agent, Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, agreed to plead guilty last week.
Sentencing will occur at a later date. Force has asked to formally enter his guilty plea on July 1.
“French Maid” and “Death From Above”
Force used multiple online personas to interact with Ross Ulbricht, the founder and mastermind of Silk Road, who went by “Dread Pirate Roberts” online. In his capacity as an undercover agent, Force controlled the “Nob” account, used to bust dealers, and enticed Ulbricht to set up a fake “hit” against a former admin. He also created a second account, unknown to his superiors, called “French Maid.”
Both accounts were used to offer Ulbricht inside information about the government’s investigation of Silk Road. Ulbricht paid both Nob and French Maid for such “counter-intelligence,” but it isn’t clear what, if anything, was ever delivered.
Force accepted two payments, worth a total of around $90,000 in bitcoins, as Nob. He accepted a single $100,000 payment as French Maid.
Operating under a third personality, “Death from Above,” Force tried to extort Ulbricht for $250,000, saying he knew his identity. But Force didn’t know who Ulbricht was—he handed over personal information connected to an earlier suspect, and the extortion attempt failed.
During the investigation, Force also moonlighted for a “digital currency exchange company” called CoinMKT. Force used his position as a DEA agent to help the company do criminal background checks, and at one point, he froze $297,000 worth of Bitcoin in the account of a CoinMKT customer, later transferring it to his own personal account.
Both Force and Bridges worked on a Baltimore-based task force investigating the site and knew each other, but were apparently running wholly separate scams. Bridges used admin credentials to lock Silk Road dealers out of their accounts and then drained their bitcoins. That turned out to be the more lucrative scheme, as it garnered Bridges some $820,000.
The corruption investigation was underway but still secret when Ulbricht went to trial in January of this year. Ulbricht’s lawyer argued, and continues to argue, that because Ulbricht was prevented from talking about the corrupt agents, his client didn’t get a fair trial. Prosecutors countered that the investigation had to be kept secret, as it was still underway, and convinced US District Judge Katherine Forrest that the Baltimore-based investigation of the corrupt agents was kept wholly separate from the New York-based investigation that proceeded to trial.
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