A couple in their thirties from New York, suspected of having sought to launder stolen bitcoins through complex cryptocurrency transactions, were arrested Tuesday morning in Manhattan.

Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, will appear before a federal judge later this afternoon, the Justice Department said.

They face up to 20 years in prison.

“These arrests and this financial seizure, the largest ever carried out by the ministry, show that cryptocurrencies are not a haven for criminals”, commented the assistant minister of Justice, Lisa Monaco, quoted in a press release.

US Deputy Justice Minister Lisa Monaco during a press conference on June 7, 2021 JONATHAN ERNST POOL/AFP/Archives

In August 2016, a hacker broke into the systems of the Hong Kong-based Bitfinex platform and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions, stealing nearly 120,000 bitcoins from its customers, an amount estimated at 71 million. dollars over the time.

According to prosecutors, the virtual currency then ended up on a digital wallet controlled by Ilya Lichtenstein, a Russian-American who, on social networks, presents himself as a “tech entrepreneur, coder and investor”.

His wife uses the alias "Razzlekhan" according to court documents.

Under this pseudonym, she has posted several rap videos, where she describes herself as the "crocodile of Wall Street".

Gold and NFT

In the five years since the theft, 25,000 bitcoins exited the wallet controlled by Ilya Lichtenstein through "a maze of cryptocurrency transactions" and in part landed in accounts opened by the couple online, including by impersonating false identities .

They mixed "old techniques and very complex transactions", commented a prosecutor during a press briefing.

These funds were used in particular to buy gold, NFTs (“non-fungible tokens”), that is to say certificates of authenticity associated with a virtual object, but also to pay current expenses, according to American officials.

The rest, now valued at $3.6 billion given the rise in bitcoin's price, was recovered last week by investigators.

Armed with a warrant, the latter had gone through the couple's online accounts and recovered the security key giving access to the wallet.

Bitfinex had offered a multimillion-dollar reward for any information leading to the stolen funds, but the Justice Department declined to say whether it played a role in the arrests of Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan.

"Zone of lawlessness"

The authorities called on the victims of the initial theft to come forward, in order to initiate the process of recovering the funds.

The investigation is continuing, they said, without wanting to comment on the author of the initial hack.

Bitcoin, a virtual currency, has only existed since 2008 and has since experienced significant price fluctuations.

It attracts big names in finance but also allows, according to the authorities, criminal networks to make their financial flows more opaque.

This file "shows that the forces of order are able to follow the wire of the money through the blockchain (a decentralized and secure technology for storing and transmitting information, editor's note) and that we will not let the cryptocurrencies (...) become an area of ​​lawlessness", commented Kenneth Polite, a senior official of the Ministry of Justice.

© 2022 AFP