New York Man Charged With Bitfinex Hack Pleads Guilty
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A New York resident has pled guilty to being involved in the 2016 hack against the Bitfinex exchange. The hacking campaign against Bitfinex resulted in the loss of Bitcoin, valued at $4.5 billion. The individual had been accused of laundering the stolen Bitcoin.
New York Resident pleads guilty to $4.5B Bitfinex hack
The individual in question is known as Ilya Lichtenstein, and he has now pled guilty to laundering the stolen Bitcoin at a federal court in Washington DC. A report that CNBC published on the matter said that Lichtenstein took the guilty plea before his wife, Heather Rhiannon Morgan.
The wife was among the people that were in this courtroom. Lichtenstein and Morgan were arrested in 2020 over the allegations of laundering crypto assets that were stolen on the Bitfinex trading platform in 2016.
Lichtenstein has been under police custody since he was arrested. His wife, Morgan, was charged as an accomplice. Morgan is an aspiring rapper popularly known by the stage name Razzlekahn or The Crocodile of Wall Street. She was freed on a $3 million bond after her arrest.
The couple was reported to be taking a plea hearing before Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelley in Washington. They are facing charges linked to conspiracy to conduct money laundering and defrauding the US.
Officials from the US Department of Justice said that Lichtenstein and his wife Morgan engaged in laundering 119,754 BTC valued at around $70 million when the coins were stolen. After the two were arrested, the DoJ retrieved 94,000 BTC valued at $3.6 billion. The seizure was the largest to be reported by the Department.
Advanced techniques to launder money
The statement from the DOJ said that around 25,000 of the stolen Bitcoin was transferred from a digital wallet owned by Lichtenstein in a complicated money laundering scheme. The DoJ said that the scheme resulted in some tokens being deposited into accounts owned by the couple.
During the plea hearing, the DoJ said that Lichtenstein had converted some of the Bitcoin that the hackers stole into gold coins. Morgan said they had buried some of the gold coins in a location known to law enforcement agencies. It has also been reported that Lichtenstein traveled to Kazakhstan and Ukraine to launder the stolen funds.
“Lichtenstein then took steps to cover his tracks by going back into Bitfinex’s network and deleting access credentials and other log files that may have given him away to law enforcement. Following the hack, Lichtenstein enlisted the help of his wife, Morgan, in laundering the stolen funds,” Lichtenstein said.
In May, several investigative journalists globally said that the Bitfinex trading platform did not publicly reveal that the exchange had recorded some security issues that resulted in the hack that led to the loss of funds. The Bitfinex exchange dismissed these allegations and denied the hack ever happened.
