Added to the list of “things you can’t make up,” two Federal agents have been arrested on charges that they stole Bitcoin from Silk Road.

The agents, named by The New York Times as Carl Mark Force IV, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA,) and Shaun W. Bridges, who worked for the Secret Service, have been charged with money laundering and wire fraud. Force was also charged with theft of government property and conflict of interest.

The criminal complaint before the Federal Court in San Francisco alleges that Force “stole and converted to his own personal use a sizable amount of Bitcoins,” during his investigation into Silk Road.

Further, Bridges is alleged to have diverted more than $800,000 worth of Bitcoin that he gained control of during the Silk Road investigation into his own Bitcoin wallet.

Both agents were named as members of a Baltimore-based task force that investigated Silk Road, and eventually led to the sites take-down, along with the imprisonment of the site’s found Ross Ulbricht.

If simple theft isn’t bad enough, Force is also alleged to have acted as a paid informant  to Ulbricht, allegedly selling information about the investigation back to Ulbricht under two different pseudonyms, one of which (and seriously, we’re not making this up) was “Nob.” The complaint claims that Force received various payments from Ulbricht for inside information of the investigation to a total of $776,000.

Ulbricht’s lawyer Joshua L. Dratel told the paper that the charges prove that the government’s investigated was flawed, saying that “it is clear from this complaint that fundamentally, the government’s investigation of Mr. Ulbricht lacked any integrity and was wholly and fatally compromised from the inside.”

Compromised investigation?

It’s not clear from the complaint exactly how deeply involved, or even how important evidence gathered from these agents is to the case against Silk Road and founder Ross Ulbricht, but there’s no question that the revelations cast at least some level of doubt into the integrity of the charges.

Force in particular has been named at the agent who pretended to facilitate a hit on Ulbricht’s rivals, charges of which are due to be heard in Baltimore later this year; at the very least if the same guy was also taking money from, and communicating separately with Ulbricht at the same time, that any evidence he had gathered as part of that aspect of the investigation will be thrown into doubt.

Force is believed to be in custody in Baltimore since last Friday and has not been given bail. Bridges is said to have surrendered to authorities in San Francisco but has since been released on bail.

photo credit: Golden Lady Justice, Bruges, Belgium via photopin (license)