Official Crown Prosecution Service portrait of former National Crime Agency officer Paul Chowles

Former UK Crime Officer Ordered to Repay £1.8 Million After Stealing 50 Bitcoin

By Isaac • September 30, 2026 11:50 am • Comments

A former officer at Britain’s National Crime Agency has been ordered to repay more than £1.8 million after stealing 50 Bitcoin from a wallet that law enforcement had already seized.

The Crown Prosecution Service said Paul Chowles, 44, abused his role on the investigation of Silk Road 2.0, a dark-web marketplace used by criminal networks. He transferred the Bitcoin out of a confiscated wallet in 2017 and then tried to disguise the trail through a series of cryptocurrency transactions.

The numbers show what made the case so unusual. The 50 Bitcoin were worth roughly £60,000 when Chowles took them.

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A court has now imposed a confiscation order of £1,810,678.93, including the value of 30 Bitcoin recovered from him.

Chowles was assigned to analyze and extract cryptocurrency from devices recovered in the Silk Road 2.0 investigation. That access put him unusually close to the assets.

Instead of safeguarding them, prosecutors say he moved 50 BTC from a reserve wallet and attempted to hide what he had done.

Decrypt’s account of the case says the coins were broken into smaller amounts, sent through the Bitcoin Fog mixing service and cashed out through Cryptopay and Wirex debit cards. The reporting says those withdrawals spanned 279 transactions totaling £144,580.

For years, the missing Bitcoin was blamed on Thomas White, who ran Silk Road 2.0. White denied taking it.

The trail was revived after a 2022 search of Chowles’ home uncovered devices holding private keys, while financial investigators traced the movement of the funds.

Decrypt also reports that the court made a compensation order for the victim. It says the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division has recovered more than £530 million through confiscation orders over the past five years and returned over £102 million to victims.

A public blockchain did not solve this theft on its own, and it did not give Chowles permanent cover. Mixers and long transaction chains made the investigation slower.

The trail still mattered once investigators connected wallet activity with devices, accounts and cash-out records.

Chowles pleaded guilty to theft, transferring criminal property and concealing criminal property. He was sentenced in 2025 to five years and six months in prison and was dismissed by the NCA.

Luke Clements of the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division said the former officer had exploited a position of trust for personal gain. The confiscation order is intended to remove the benefit of the crime rather than let Bitcoin’s rise turn the theft into a windfall.

That distinction matters. The original theft involved an asset worth about £60,000.

The recovery demand is measured in today’s much larger value, meaning the price appreciation that made the stolen Bitcoin so lucrative also made the final financial consequence far more severe.

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