An officer with Britain’s National Crime Agency who stole cryptocurrency from the operator of an illegal dark web marketplace was jailed on Wednesday for 5-1/2 years.

The NCA was investigating the Silk Road 2.0 site – which allowed users to buy drugs and other illicit goods after the original Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in 2013 – and arrested Liverpool-based Thomas White in 2014.

Intelligence officer Paul Chowles took the details of White’s “retirement wallet” and stole 50 bitcoin before sending it to a cryptocurrency “mixing” service called Bitcoin Fog to obscure the source, prosecutors said.

Chowles, 42, appeared in Liverpool Crown Court having pleaded guilty to one count of theft, one count of transferring criminal property, and one count of concealing criminal property.

Prosecutor Craig Hassall said the bitcoin Chowles stole was worth just under 60,000 pounds (around $80,000) at the time of the theft in May 2017 and is now worth over 4 million pounds, though Chowles had realised nearly 145,000 pounds.

Chowles was dismissed by the NCA this month for gross misconduct after his guilty pleas, having been arrested in 2022.

The NCA initially thought White, who was jailed in 2019 for over five years, had managed to access his bitcoin wallet and remove the 50 missing bitcoin, Hassall said.

The remaining 47 bitcoin in White’s wallet were sold by the NCA for roughly 500,000 pounds, and the funds paid towards a 1.5 million-pound confiscation order made against White.

But police and the NCA began to investigate after White said he was not responsible for moving the 50 bitcoin, and usernames and passwords linked to White’s cryptocurrency accounts were found in Chowles’ notebooks when he was arrested.

Judge David Aubrey said bitcoin worth nearly 470,000 pounds was seized from Chowles, telling him: “Had you not been arrested, you would have continued to reap the rewards of your wrongdoing.”