TikTok Video of 2016 Bitfinex Hacker, Heather Morgan, Goes Viral
U.S. DoJ arrested two individuals in New York on Tuesday on charges of conspiring to launder proceeds from the Bitfinex hack in 2016. The married couple, Ilya 'Dutch' Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan will appear in court at 3:00 p.m. ET in New York. The DoJ has called it the 'largest crypto seizure to date'.
2016 Bitfinex Hack Saw 120,000 BTC Being Stolen
The 'largest crypto seizure to date' has come six years after 120,000 BTC were stolen in a Bitfinex hack in 2016. The stolen Bitcoins were worth $60 million back then and represented almost one-sixth of the total trading volume at the time. This would be worth almost $4.5 billion today. However, the DoJ has only seized 94,000 BTC which are valued at $3.6 billion. According to the law enforcement agency, the two conspirators planned to launder these bitcoins. However, they don't claim that the two were the masterminds behind the original hack.
The couple allegedly used various techniques to launder the stolen bitcoin, including splitting transactions up into thousands of smaller transactions to avoid traceability, using darknet markets, and converting the stolen bitcoins into other types of crypto such as Monero. The statement also named darknet market AlphaBay as one such platform that was allegedly used by the couple.
Soon after the seizure was made, Bitfinex said in a statement that it would work with the DOJ to try and recover the seized bitcoin. It said that if it manages to recover the stolen bitcoins, it will repay investors in its UNUS SED LEO token, which was created to try and backstop a fiscal hole created after an unrelated payment processor used by Bitfinex was seized by authorities in three different countries.
