It was one of the biggest thefts in crypto history: in 2016, 120,000 bitcoins were stolen from crypto exchange Bitfinex.

That was an unbelievable $71 million back then - today that's $4.5 billion.

And those bitcoins have reappeared.

The American government confiscated them.

This is also the largest seizure of financial assets in the history of the Justice Department.

Franz Nestler

Editor in Business.

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At the same time, two suspects were arrested.

They are now accused of money laundering conspiracy and fraud.

The accused are 34 and 31 years old.

The New York couple were arrested in Manhattan.

They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

They are said to have been trying to launder the money at great expense since 2017.

They used at least ten crypto exchanges and shell companies.

Under fictitious names, they opened accounts and bought physical gold for Bitcoin – or had the money withdrawn from Bitcoin ATMs.

They even got gift certificates from it.

They are also said to have bought NFT.

Some crypto exchanges blocked the couple's accounts because they could not identify themselves, losing millions in the process.

But something else was fatal to the accused: they repeatedly used the same IP address and an Indian e-mail provider.

To do this, they bought gift vouchers in their own name, and gold was delivered directly to their home address.

Such amateurish mistakes are at least unusual for the size of the hack.

The noose finally tightened when the husband put a file on a cloud server.

It contained 2000 crypto wallet addresses with all the keys needed to get the money.

An authority was able to crack this file, but this is not mentioned.

Almost 95,000 Bitcoin were then confiscated.

Amateur error

Given this amateurish blunder, it seems unlikely that the couple are also the hackers.

It is also unclear why they did not take their assets to a country that does not extradite to the United States.

However, what happened at the time with the hack is still unclear.

The exchange was offline for some time afterwards and trading was suspended.

At that time, every Bitfinex customer had to give up 36.067 percent of the Bitcoin they had invested in this exchange, regardless of whether their own account was emptied by the hackers or not.

As a small consolation, there were tokens as a credit back then.

The exchange rate of the currency collapsed at that time.

Bitfinex itself now welcomed the confiscation.

We want to continue to work closely with the Ministry of Justice.

However, it is still unclear what will happen next with the confiscated Bitcoin.

Bitfinex will take all legal means for a repayment, it says only.

Representatives of the Ministry of Justice, on the other hand, emphasized that a court case should be initiated in which the injured party can reclaim their stolen Bitcoin.

Otherwise they were extremely satisfied.

"Today's arrest shows that cryptocurrencies are not a safe haven for criminals," Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said.