A federal agent has revealed plans to fight allegations he stole a cryptocurrency fortune seized from an steroid trafficking ring in Melbourne.
Australian Federal Police officer William Wheatley appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Friday, pleading not guilty to using information obtained in his role as a public officer to benefit himself, theft and dealing with the proceeds of crime.
Two further charges of dishonestly obtaining property, and dealing with the proceeds of crime were struck out by Magistrate Malcolm Thomas during the four day committal hearing.
Prosecutors from Australia’s National Anti-corruption Commission allege Mr Wheatley stole 81.616 bitcoin identified following a raid on a Hoppers Crossing home in January 2019.
The raid was conducted as part of Operation Viridian, a joint AFP and Victoria Police investigation targeting drug trafficking through the postal service.
Alongside a large quantities of a “steroid-type” substance, detectives found a Trezor-brand hardware cryptocurrency wallet at the property.
The court was told it took investigators three weeks to secure approval from a magistrate to access the wallet, discovering on February 14 it had been emptied just four days after the raid.
Also discovered at the scene was a device containing a “seed phrase” – a string of randomly assigned words – which would allow anyone to access the digital wallet.
Giving evidence, Cyber Crime Squad Detective Sergeant Deon Achtypis said investigators initially believed an associate of the crime syndicate had transferred the bitcoin, then worth about $450,000, after the raid.
Today the same amount of bitcoin would be worth more than $6.3 million.
“It was used as an anonymised training aid to highlight the unique risks posed by crypto to law enforcement,” he said.
But two years later after Victoria Police implemented new cryptocurrency tracing tools, Detective Achtypis revisited the case in 2021.
The currency was tracked to a crypto exchange called Binance, with the cyber crime unit finding one IP address used to access the stolen coin was linked to the then-AFP headquarters.
“I could not conceive of any valid business reason why an IP address associated with the AFP would appear,” Detective Archypis said.
“I formed the opinion that a police member may have been involved in the movement of the cryptocurrency.”
An internal investigation was launched by the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, which focused on five cyber crime officers who were on duty on February 8 – the date the IP address associated with the AFP headquarters was used in connection with the stolen crypto.
The court was told Mr Wheatley became the focus of the investigation after another IP address, connected to a Richmond home, was linked to the officer through a woman named Ashley Tell.
A Wales-based cryptocurrency investigator, Craig Gillespie, told the court some transactions were allegedly traced to withdrawals made into Mr Wheatley’s bank account between 2019 and September 2022.
AFP officer Jesse Whyte, who was investigated as part of the corruption probe, told the court when the cryptocurrency wallet was discovered he reached out to Mr Wheatley, who he said was a crypto “specialist”.
“You ever seen one of these? Maybe a cryptocurrency thing,” he wrote in a text message to the then off-duty officer.
The suspended police officer was committed to stand trial in the County Court by Magistrate Thomas who found the evidence could support a conviction.
His lawyer, Luke Barker, told the court the case against his client was “circumstantial” and they would be disputing alleged actions attributed to his client.
He estimated the trial could run for up to three months.
Mr Wheatley declined to comment on the allegations outside court and will next appear in the County Court in March.