A Drug Enforcement Administration agent intimately involved in the Silk Road investigation admitted on Wednesday he secretly accepted bitcoins from the underground website’s operator and illegally took other funds.Carl Mark Force IV, who was a DEA agent for 15 years, pleaded guilty to money laundering, obstruction of justice and extortion under color of official right, according to the plea agreement, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.Force could face up to 20 years in prison on each of the counts.Force, who was based in Baltimore, was part of a multi-agency task force investigating the Silk Road, an underground marketplace for goods such as drugs and fake ID documents. It was shut down in October 2013. Its operator, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences and 40 years of additional terms. Ulbricht plans to appeal based in part on the actions of Force and a Secret Service investigator, Shaun Bridges.Force was accused of having the DEA freeze the account of a Silk Road user and transferring the $297,000 into his own personal account rather than to the agency. He also took two payments of bitcoins directly from Ulbricht, totaling about $148,000, in 2013. Using two online nicknames — French Maid and Nob — he convinced Ulbricht he had inside information about federal investigations into the Silk Road.Bridges, who was charged with money laundering and obstruction of justice, took more than $800,000 worth of bitcoins from Silk Road using a hijacked administrator account, the DOJ said. He also reached a plea agreement with prosecutors.The involvement of two corrupt federal agents in the Silk Road investigation has given Ulbricht’s attorney, Joshua Dratel, fuel for an appeal. He has claimed the investigation was flawed and that the government concealed evidence necessary for his client’s defense.Although Dratel knew of the investigation of Force during the trial, he was not allowed to introduce facts about it into evidence. The involvement of Bridges was revealed in March, weeks after Ulbricht was convicted on Feb. 4.Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk Related content news Google Chrome zero-day jumps onto CISA's known vulnerability list A serious security flaw in Google Chrome, which was discovered under active exploitation in the wild, is a new addition to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s Known Exploited vulnerabilities catalog. By Jon Gold Oct 03, 2023 3 mins Zero-day vulnerability brandpost The advantages and risks of large language models in the cloud Understanding the pros and cons of LLMs in the cloud is a step closer to optimized efficiency—but be mindful of security concerns along the way. By Daniel Prizmant, Senior Principal Researcher at Palo Alto Networks Oct 03, 2023 5 mins Cloud Security news Arm patches bugs in Mali GPUs that affect Android phones and Chromebooks The vulnerability with active exploitations allows local non-privileged users to access freed-up memory for staging new attacks. By Shweta Sharma Oct 03, 2023 3 mins Android Security Vulnerabilities news UK businesses face tightening cybersecurity budgets as incidents spike More than a quarter of UK organisations think their cybersecurity budget is inadequate to protect them from growing threats. By Michael Hill Oct 03, 2023 3 mins CSO and CISO Risk Management Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe