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Six years in the slammer for SilkRoad-skimming secret agent

'Breathtaking abuse of trust,' judge says of Shaun Bridges

Shaun Bridges, the light-fingered Secret Service agent who pleaded guilty to scamming SilkRoad while he was investigating the online drugs-and-vulnerabilities marketplace, has copped a six-year sentence for his trouble.

US district court judge Richard Seeborg called Bridges' actions, which netted him around US$820,000, a "breathtaking abuse of trust" while handing down the sentence in a San Francisco court.

As Bloomberg reports, the judge said Bridges hijacked a SilkRoad admin's account for the theft.

Since the now-jailed SilkRoad kingpin Ross Ulbricht assumed the admin, Curtis Green, was responsible for the theft, Bridges' actions put him in danger of his life, so the crime deserved a sentence near the top of the scale, calling it "an extraordinary breach of public trust that could have gotten a person killed."

After his arrest, Green provided his admin logins to investigators. As The Register reported in May, he used that access to move the money – around 20,000 Bitcoins – from SilkRoad sellers to his own wallet, which he then converted to cash at the now-defunct MtGox exchange.

Bridges entered his guilty plea in September. Another scamming investigator, former DEA agent Carl Force, had already taken a plea deal in July and was sentenced to six and a half years in prison in October 2015. ®

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