Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan are accused of laundering the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen from Bitfinex’s platform in 2016.
The Department of Justice announced the seizure of more than $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency that was stolen during an attack on the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange in August 2016. The DOJ also said it arrested 34-year-old Ilya Lichtenstein and his 31-year-old wife Heather Morgan for their role in attempting to launder 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen during the attack on the Hong Kong exchange. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco called the seizure the „department’s largest financial seizure ever.“ In total, about $4.5 billion was stolen from the exchange, and two brothers, Eli and Assaf Gigi, were arrested by Israeli authorities in 2019 for their involvement in the attack. But on Tuesday, the Justice Department said Lichtenstein and Morgan — both of whom were very active on social media — initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions as they tried to launder the 119,754 bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex. „Those unauthorized transactions sent the stolen bitcoin to a digital wallet under Lichtenstein’s control. Over the last five years, approximately 25,000 of those stolen bitcoin were transferred out of Lichtenstein’s wallet via a complicated money laundering process that ended with some of the stolen funds being deposited into financial accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan,“ the DOJ explained. „The remainder of the stolen funds, comprising more than 94,000 bitcoin, remained in the wallet used to receive and store the illegal proceeds from the hack. After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein.
