By Ross Todd, From The Recorder

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in San Francisco has sentenced a former Secret Service agent to nearly six years in prison for stealing about $800,000 in digital currency while investigating the Silk Road online black market and drug bazaar.

U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg on Monday sentenced former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges to 71 months, one month shy of six years and well above the three-year sentence his defense lawyers had requested.

Bridges, a former Secret Service expert on computer forensics and anonymity software, was arrested in March after serving on a Baltimore-based task force investigating the Silk Road site. Bridges pleaded guilty in October to using information, gleaned from a Silk Road administrator arrested during the investigation, to lock users out of their accounts, steal Bitcoin from them and deposit the digital currency into his own personal account.

Bridges’s lawyers, Steven Levin at Levin & Curlett and Craig Denney at Snell & Wilmer, had asked Seeborg for a sentence of just three years in prison, arguing in their sentencing memo that his “prior life of accomplishment, commitment, sacrifice, and integrity” should factor into his punishment. But Seeborg sided with federal prosecutors who asked for a prison term on the high end of the 57- to 71-month range suggested by the federal sentencing guidelines to deter other law enforcement officials from similarly abusing their authority.

Bridges is the second former federal agent who served on the Silk Road task force to be sentenced by Seeborg. The judge in October sentenced former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Mark Force IV to six-and-a-half years in prison. Force pled guilty earlier this year to using fake online personas and complex Bitcoin transactions to steal from Silk Road’s founder and hide the proceeds from the government.

IMAGE: Judge Richard Seeborg, United States District court for the Northern District of California Jason Doiy / The Recorder

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