Former NCA officer Chowles ordered to repay £1.8M for stealing Bitcoin from Silk Road case
The UK Crown Prosecution Service has secured a confiscation order forcing former National Crime Agency officer Paul Chowles to repay £1,810,678.93 for stealing Bitcoin his own unit had seized from a dark web operator. The sum, detailed in a CPS confiscation order, is roughly 30 times the £60,000 the stolen coins were worth in 2017, underscoring how law enforcement custody of crypto assets carries appreciation risk regulators rarely price in.
- Chowles must repay £1,810,678.93, versus the roughly £60,000 the 50 stolen Bitcoin were worth when he took them in May 2017.
- Only 30 of the 50 stolen coins were ever recovered from him; the confiscation order covers their value plus his laundering proceeds.
- He is at least the third Silk Road-linked investigator convicted of stealing the cryptocurrency he was tasked with tracking, after DEA agent Carl Force and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges.
- £1.8M confiscation order versus roughly £60,000 value when stolen in 2017
- 5.5 yrs prison term handed down at Liverpool Crown Court
- 61,000 BTC separately held by UK courts from an unrelated Chinese fraud case, worth about $6.8 billion
Chowles, 44, pleaded guilty to theft, transferring criminal property and concealing criminal property, and was jailed for five and a half years at Liverpool Crown Court in July 2025. The CPS Proceeds of Crime Division announced the confiscation order this week, first reported by Cryptopolitan. The order includes the value of the 30 recovered Bitcoin and strips him of the remaining criminal benefit Merseyside Police calculated at £613,147.29.
CPS Traces 50 Stolen Coins to an NCA Insider
The theft dates to an NCA operation against Silk Road 2.0, the dark web marketplace Thomas White launched within weeks of the FBI shutting down the original Silk Road in 2013. White was jailed for 64 months in April 2019.
Chowles led the technical work extracting data and cryptocurrency from devices seized from White, according to a second CPS account of his 2025 sentencing. Over 6 and 7 May 2017, he transferred 50 of the 97 Bitcoin held in White’s “retirement wallet” to a public address, then routed the funds through Bitcoin Fog, a mixing service used to obscure transaction trails for criminals.
Investigators initially assumed White had moved the coins himself, and the loss was written off as untraceable by late 2021. White insisted only NCA staff holding his private keys could have done it, a claim Merseyside Police eventually confirmed.
Luke Clements Says Chowles “Exploited a Position of Trust”
CPS specialist prosecutor Luke Clements framed the order as a deterrent against insiders profiting from seized crypto.
Paul Chowles exploited a position of trust for personal gain, stealing assets that had already been recovered through law enforcement action. Confiscation Orders are a powerful tool in ensuring that crime does not pay.
Luke Clements, Specialist Prosecutor, CPS Proceeds of Crime Division
Chowles was dismissed from the NCA on 11 July 2025. A compensation order was also issued for the victim, though the funds will go toward White’s own outstanding confiscation total rather than to him directly.
Third Investigator Caught, Following Carl Force and Shaun Bridges
Chowles joins a pattern rather than starting one. DEA agent Carl Force, who worked the Baltimore task force on the original Silk Road case, was sentenced to 78 months in 2015 for stealing Bitcoin and extorting the site’s operator. Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges was separately convicted for taking about $820,000 in Bitcoin from the same investigation.
For institutional investors watching custody frameworks evolve, the case is a reminder that even government seizure wallets rely on individual key access rather than multi-party controls.
UK High Court Still Weighing 61,000 Bitcoin From an Unrelated Case
Separately, UK authorities are holding more than 61,000 Bitcoin seized in 2018 from a money-laundering operation tied to Zhimin Qian, who was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in November 2025. Cryptopolitan put the haul’s current value at about $6.8 billion, though the coins were worth a small fraction of that at the time of seizure.
In July, the High Court spent three days deciding whether British or Chinese law governs who claims the appreciation. UK law could let roughly 16,000 Chinese fraud victims claim the gains alongside their principal, while Chinese law would cap recovery at principal and interest only.
The CCS read. Seized crypto that sits untouched for years while its price multiplies turns confiscation law into an asset-management problem nobody designed for. Agencies now effectively run unhedged long Bitcoin positions on behalf of the state, and courts, not treasuries, are deciding who owns the upside. That tension will resurface every time a multi-year seizure outlasts a bull market.
The High Court has yet to rule on which jurisdiction’s law governs the Qian case’s 61,000 Bitcoin, a decision that will determine whether roughly 16,000 fraud victims can claim appreciation gains or only their original principal.
