A United Kingdom court has ordered former National Crime Agency (NCA) officer Paul Chowles to repay £1,810,678.93 — roughly 30 times the value of the Bitcoin he stole from a stash his own agency had seized.

Chowles, 44, is at least the third investigator connected to the Silk Road cases to be caught stealing cryptocurrency he had been tasked with tracking — a recurrence that has made insider abuse of seized-crypto custody one of the most persistent risks for agencies managing confiscated digital assets.

How Much Will Paul Chowles Pay?

In 2017, Chowles, then an NCA officer, stole coins worth approximately £60,000, or $77,000. Bitcoin's price has risen sharply since the theft, and he now owes a seven-figure confiscation bill of £1,810,678.93.

The coins had been seized from Thomas White, a dark-web operator, during a joint operation between the NCA and the FBI against Silk Road 2.0. White launched the marketplace within weeks of the FBI shutting down the original Silk Road in 2013. He received a 64-month sentence in April 2019, and Chowles led the technical work of extracting data and cryptocurrency from the devices seized from him.

Fifty of the 97 Bitcoin taken from White's "retirement wallet" disappeared over two days in May 2017 and were routed through the Bitcoin Fog mixer to obscure the trail. Investigators initially assumed White had moved the funds himself, and by late 2021 the loss was written off as untraceable. White insisted otherwise, telling investigators that the only people who could have taken the coins were inside the NCA, since the agency held his private keys.

A Merseyside Police investigation eventually traced the coins to Chowles, who was jailed for five and a half years in July 2025 after admitting theft, transferring criminal property, and concealing criminal property, according to the Crown Prosecution Service. He was dismissed from the NCA on 11 July 2025.

His case mirrors earlier misconduct in the same investigations. Carl Force, a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent on the Baltimore task force that ran the original Silk Road probe, was sentenced to 78 months in prison in 2015 for stealing Bitcoin during that investigation and extorting the site's operator. Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges was also convicted for taking about $820,000 in Bitcoin from the same case. Together, the three cases span the US and UK and stretch across a decade, underlining the custody risks that arise when evidence seized in a criminal investigation can itself be worth millions.

How Much Will the State Receive?

Of the 50 stolen coins, 30 were recovered from Chowles. The confiscation order, announced Wednesday, was made under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 — the legislation UK courts use to strip offenders of the financial benefit of their criminal conduct rather than simply to punish at sentencing. According to the CPS, Merseyside Police valued the direct benefit from the theft at £613,147.29 in 2025.

For agencies that seize and hold cryptocurrency, the case shows how price appreciation magnifies both the value of the assets in their custody and the scale of losses when insiders abuse access to them.

Luke Clements, a specialist prosecutor in the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division, said Chowles exploited his privileged position for personal gain. A compensation order has been made for the victim in the case, but the funds will go toward White's outstanding confiscation total.

Separately: More Than 61,000 Bitcoin Held by UK Authorities

UK authorities are separately holding more than 61,000 Bitcoin seized in 2018 from a money-laundering operation linked to Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in November 2025. Cryptopolitan reported the haul at about $6.8 billion — a fraction of the coins' value when they were seized.

In July, the UK High Court spent three days weighing whether British or Chinese law would determine who receives the appreciation. UK law could allow roughly 16,000 Chinese fraud victims to claim property rights over the coins and their gains, while Chinese law would cap their recovery at principal and interest. Which regime governs is now the open question to watch, and taken together the two matters — a roughly -fold confiscation on 50 stolen coins and a multi-billion-dollar state-held stash — show how Bitcoin's climb since the 2010s has raised the stakes of older seizures for victims, the state, and the officials who handle the coins.