It's the epilogue of a soap opera that started more than five years ago.
The United States announced on Tuesday that it had recovered more than 94,000 bitcoins stolen in 2016 from the Bitfinex virtual trading platform and valued today at 3.6 billion dollars, a record amount for a judicial seizure.
A couple in their thirties from New York, charged with laundering some of the bitcoins stolen via complex cryptocurrency transactions, were arrested Tuesday morning in Manhattan.
Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, who has dual Russian and American citizenship, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, a Forbes contributor, who presented herself as an entrepreneur and also had a sick satirical rap YouTube channel, were introduced to a federal judge on Tuesday afternoon.
The judge agreed that they be released on bonds of 5 and 3 million dollars.
They face up to 25 years in prison.
Nebula of transactions
“These arrests and this financial seizure, the largest ever carried out by the ministry, show that cryptocurrencies are not a refuge for criminals”, commented the assistant minister of Justice, Lisa Monaco, quoted in a press release.
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”.
At this stage, he is not charged with the hacking, but if subsequent charges remain possible.
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".
Sorry I cut off the beginning pic.twitter.com/YsIoQWefo7
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) February 8, 2022
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 partly 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.
Multi-Million Dollar Reward
Bitfinex had offered a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to the stolen funds, but the Justice Department declined to say whether it played a role in the couple's arrest.
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 police are able to follow the thread of 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 a lawless zone,” commented Kenneth Polite, a senior Justice Department official.
Bitcoin
Piracy
high tech
Economy
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