Former NCA officer's £1.81m order prices each recovered bitcoin at what all 50 were worth in 2017

Divide the order by the 30 coins it covers and each comes out at about £60,356 ^[1]. In May 2017 the whole 50-coin haul was worth about £60,000, or roughly £1,200 a coin ^[2][3][2]. Each bitcoin Chowles still held when police reached him is now priced at close to what all fifty were worth when he took them, about 50 times the 2017 price per coin ^[3].

The CPS put the gap between the two figures down to bitcoin's appreciation since 2017 ^[5], but the order reaches only the recovered coins. The other 20 were deemed spent ^[4]. Had the 30 stayed in NCA custody unsold, they would be worth the same today, so the £1.81 million is the value of an asset the state already held, marked up while it was stolen. At the same implied price, the spent 20 would be worth about £1.21 million ^[4].

The NCA had seized about 97 coins in the probe ^[6], so the officer leading extraction took about 52% of the seizure ^[5]. Crypto Briefing reports the loss went unnoticed for five years ^[19], and that the case turned when White reported the missing coins after his release from prison ^[11].

"Paul Chowles exploited a position of trust for personal gain, stealing assets that had already been recovered through law enforcement action," said Luke Clements, a specialist prosecutor in the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division ^[15]. He said the agency would "pursue offenders' assets relentlessly" ^[16]. The order is about a third of one percent of the more than £530 million his division has recovered through confiscation orders in five years ^[18][6].

The case supports three readings. One is that the system worked: Cryptopay and Wirex run know-your-customer checks, according to Crypto Briefing ^[20], and the Bitcoin Fog mixer did not hide the trail from Chainalysis ^[12]. A second is price luck, since the thief kept 30 coins through the rise ^[4][5]. The third is that an officer with extraction duties held working keys to seized coins from 2017 until a 2022 search, while the suspect took the blame ^[7][10][12]. I think the third is right. The first two describe the clean-up.

The counter-thesis is that this was a single theft, committed about nine years before the order, by one officer the NCA has since dismissed ^[1][2][14]. The sources do not describe how the NCA restricts access to seized wallet keys today. Evidence that no single officer can now move seized coins would weaken the view.