A Recent York man on Thursday admitted to being the unique hacker of bitcoin within the 2016 cyberattack on Bitfinex, a theft that ended up being price $4.5 billion.
Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein made that bombshell admission while pleading guilty to laundering the stolen bitcoin in Washington, D.C., federal court.
The plea got here before his wife, Heather Rhiannon Morgan, who was within the audience, stepped as much as enter her own guilty plea hearing within the case.
Until Thursday’s admission in court by Lichtenstein, it was not publicly known who had hacked the bitcoin from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.
The couple had not been charged within the hack itself.
After they were arrested in February 2022, the Department of Justice said officials had seized greater than 94,000 bitcoin of the greater than 119,000 hacked bitcoin. The seized bitcoin was price about $3.6 billion, making it the biggest seizure in DOJ history.
When the bitcoin was stolen, it was price just $70 million.
But its value soared through the years to $4.5 billion, as about “25,000 of those stolen bitcoin were transferred out of Lichtenstein’s wallet via an advanced money laundering process that ended with a few of the stolen funds being deposited into financial accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan,” the DOJ said once they were arrested.
Lichtenstein, who’s a Russian emigre, has been held without bond since his arrest after a judge ruled he’s a flight risk.
He’ll remain jailed until his sentencing on a count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators.
Morgan, an aspiring rapper often known as “Razzlekahn” and “The Crocodile of Wall Street,” was in court for her husband’s plea hearing. She has been free on $3 million bond since her arrest.
Lichtenstein smiled at her and blew her a kiss during their moment of eye contact, the primary time they’d seen one another in greater than a 12 months.Â
During Lichtenstein’s plea hearing, it was revealed that he had converted some assets to gold coins, and that Morgan had buried gold coins at a location now known to law enforcement officials.
And it also was revealed that Lichtenstein’s past travel to Ukraine and Kazakhstan was done to convert digital assets to money through Russian and Ukrainian middlemen. That money was then shipped to addresses in Russia and Ukraine, where Lichtenstein pick it up physically and deposited it into U.S. accounts so he could retrieve it while in Recent York City.
The Crypto Couple’s separate plea hearings were moved up from their originally scheduled times Thursday as a result of arraignment later within the afternoon in the identical courthouse of Donald Trump. The previous president was charged Thursday in that case with crimes related to an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.
A charging document filed last month against the couple says that in early 2107 Lichtenstein “began to maneuver a portion of the bitcoin” stolen within the hack “in a series of small, complex transactions across multiple accounts and platforms.”
This shuffling, which created a voluminous variety of transactions, was designed to hide the trail of the stolen funds,” in response to that filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Prosecutors wrote that in February 2018, Lichtenstein and Morgan established an account at a U.S. financial institution for his or her company, Endpass, “and in doing so, represented to [that institution] that the first payments into the account can be from software-as-a-service customer payments.”
“Actually, Lichtenstein and Morgan used the account to launder proceeds of the hack of” Bitfinex, the filing charges.
On the heels of their arrests last 12 months, Netflix said it had commissioned a series on the couple.
– Eamon Javers reported from Washington, D.C. Dan Mangan reported from Natick, Mass.
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