In a Reddit post, Mark Karpeles revealed emails from Carl Mark Force IV, the Federal Agent accused of stealing Silk Road bitcoins, suggesting Force tried to become Mt. Gox’s representative in U.S. and Canada.
As CoinFox reported on Monday, two former federal agents, Carl Mark Force IV and Shaun W. Bridges, of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service respectively, have been arrested and charged with stealing bitcoins from Silk Road and extorting money from Silk Road’s mastermind Dread Pirate Roberts (revealed by a recent trial to have been Ross Ulbricht). The affidavit filed by the special agent Tigran Gambaryan lists many other incriminating allegations that, regarding Force, can be summarized in one sentence: the DEA agent seems to have used his official position to blackmail various startups into giving him money or concealing the traces of his illegal activities.
The publication of the affidavit spurred bitcoiners on to look for everything connected to the corrupt officials on the web. Quite surprisingly, it looks that Force often did not even try to disguise himself. According to Coindesk, he willingly disclosed information about his position on the Bitcoin Talk forum, where he offered tax advice for bitcoiners, charging 1 BTC per session. He would state to his potential clients that he is not just a government agent, but also a certified public accountant.
New evidence on Force was revealed by Mark Karpeles, CEO of the defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, who published a number of email screenshots. According to these screenshots, Force first contacted him in April 2013, stating “The Bitcoin fascinates me” and signing “Carl Mark Force IV, DEA Special Agent and CPA”. He told Karpeles that he was “exploring other work opportunities” and stated his belief that bitcoin is the currency of the future because “the American government and economy will crash in the next five years”. On May 7th, 2013, he told Karpeles that he would like to be a U. S. and Canada representative for Mt. Gox. Karpeles did not answer the rmail. On May 15th, money from a U. S. subsidiary account of Mt. Gox was seized by U. S. government, on the grounds that the subsidiary did not have a license. It was on this day, says Karpeles, that he received the last message from Force. With a smiley face in a subject line, it ran: “told you should have partnered with me!”
The publication provoked a general uproar within the bitcoin community, already agitated with the news of Federal Agents getting arrested. Some of them even suggested that the crash of Mt. Gox as a whole had been provoked by U. S. government wishing to steal money. While this point of view is a minority one, many others wonder “how many NSA cyber spies have been stealing Bitcoin for fun and profit using the nearly unlimited power of their spying apparatus”. Some are suggesting that new evidence could play a role the appeals process in Ross Ulbricht’s case. Joshua Dratel, Ulbricht’s lawyer, issued a public statement, saying that this evidence, which probably could have affected the jurors, was known at the time of the trial but the government forbade to reveal it.
Carl Mark Force served as a DEA agent for 15 years, from 1999 until his resignation in May 2014.
The Silk Road was an online black market, best known for the sale of forbidden commodities, mostly drugs. It began to operate in 2011 and was closed by FBI in 2013. In February 2015, Ross Ulbricht was convicted by the jury on charges of running the illegal site under the alias of Dread Pirate Roberts.
Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange that launched in 2010. From 2011, it was run by Mark Karpeles. By 2013, it controlled 70% of all bitcoin transactions. It went bankrupt in 2014.
