EX-NCA OFFICER ORDERED TO REPAY £1.8M OVER STOLEN BITCOIN

A former National Crime Agency officer has been ordered to repay £1.8 million after stealing Bitcoin that had been seized during a dark web investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service said. Paul Chowles, 44, from Bristol, was jailed for five and a half years at Liverpool Crown Court last year after admitting theft and money laundering. He took 50 of 97 Bitcoin recovered from Thomas White, who ran the Silk Road 2.0 marketplace and was jailed in 2019. Chowles transferred the coins from White's wallet in May 2017 while working on the analysis and extraction of cryptocurrency from devices seized in the case, then split them into smaller amounts and routed them through the mixing service Bitcoin Fog to obscure the transactions. Merseyside Police launched an investigation after the missing coins were discovered, and Chowles was arrested in May 2022.

The National Crime Agency had initially assumed White had somehow accessed the wallet while in custody, which he denied, before the investigation identified Chowles as responsible. Police recovered 30 of the 50 stolen Bitcoin from him. The coins were worth around £60,000 when stolen in 2017, but the Crown Prosecution Service said their value had risen to more than £4.4 million by the time of sentencing in July 2025, putting the benefit attributed to Chowles' offending at just over £1.97 million. Liverpool Crown Court assessed Chowles' available assets at £1,810,678.93 and ordered him to pay that amount under a confiscation order.

Luke Clements, a specialist prosecutor in the Crown Prosecution Service's Proceeds of Crime Division, said Chowles had "exploited a position of trust for personal gain, stealing assets that had already been recovered through law enforcement action." He said confiscation orders were "a powerful tool in ensuring that crime does not pay" and that the Crown Prosecution Service would "pursue offenders' assets relentlessly" to recover criminal proceeds wherever they are hidden.