The United States has filed a notice to sell over $130 million worth of bitcoins seized in connection to Silk Road.
US Selling $132 Million in Bitcoin
The bitcoins up for sale are associated with Ryan Farace, who was sentenced last year in Maryland to 54 months in prison for conspiracy and money laundering. Farace and his father, Joseph, were found guilty of laundering bitcoins that were originally used for drug trafficking and should have been confiscated by the United States. According to guilty pleas and other court documents, Farace was convicted in 2018 of a conspiracy to manufacture and distribute [Xanax] in exchange for Bitcoin on darknet markets. He and his father were found guilty of conspiring to “transfer more than 2,874 bitcoins to a third party, so that the funds could be transferred to a foreign bank account.”
The first lot of bitcoins is also linked to Shaun Bridges, a former Secret Service agent and member of the Silk Road Task Force in Baltimore. Bridges was sentenced to six years in prison in 2015 for stealing BTC during the U.S. government’s investigation of the Silk Road black market.
In his guilty plea, Bridges admitted to using a private key to access a digital wallet owned by the U.S. government and then transferring the bitcoins to other digital wallets on different bitcoin exchanges that only he had access to.
DOJ
Both Faraces have been ordered to forfeit their bitcoins, while Bridges has agreed to surrender the stolen bitcoins to U.S. authorities.
