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Ministry of Justice Seizes $3.6 Billion in Bitcoin and Arrests Marrieds


WASHINGTON – The Justice Department said on Tuesday it has confiscated over $3.6 billion in stolen Bitcoin and arrested a married couple accused of laundering cryptocurrency stolen by hackers six years ago.

The couple, 34-year-old Ilya Lichtenstein and 31-year-old Heather Morgan, were previously accused of conspiring to launder 119,754 Bitcoins stolen. stolen in 2016 From Hong Kong-based Bitfinex, one of the world’s largest virtual currency exchanges.

Officials said the currency’s value at the time it was seized last week made it the ministry’s largest ever financial seizure.

A Justice Department official declined to comment on whether Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan were involved in the hacking itself.

The breach in 2016 was among a series of attacks on currency exchanges that allowed large amounts of digital currency to be stolen. Even when the stolen funds were recovered, the thefts highlighted vulnerabilities in the relatively new world of cryptocurrencies. In some cases, events massively affected cryptocurrency values.

After Bitfinex was hacked, largest exchanges In the history of the cryptocurrency market, the value of Bitcoin initially dropped by about 20 percent.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said in a statement that Tuesday’s arrests “show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals.” “In a futile effort to maintain digital anonymity, the defendants laundered stolen funds through the maze of cryptocurrency transactions.”

Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan appeared in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Lichtenstein, who goes by his Dutch alias, holds both American and Russian citizenship and describes himself as a tech entrepreneur, according to the complaint. Ms. Morgan describes herself on her LinkedIn page as a “serial entrepreneur” and a “disrespectful comedy rapper”. The complaint, which also accuses the couple of conspiring to defraud the United States, alleges that Ms. Morgan also used the pseudonym Razzlekhan.

According to this court documentsHacking Bitfinex’s systems, the hacker initiated 2,000 transactions to send 119,754 stolen Bitcoins to a digital wallet under the control of Mr. Lichtenstein.

The Justice Department said that over the past five years, about 25,000 of these Bitcoins have been transferred from Mr. Lichtenstein’s wallet, using a complex series of transactions in an attempt to hide that the currency was stolen from Bitfinex.

However, researchers are looking at Bitcoin’s movement. blockchainpermanent electronic ledger that records each time a Bitcoin is transferred to a new digital wallet. And some of those funds were deposited in financial accounts controlled by Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan, who, according to the complaint, used some of the money to purchase items such as gold, non-replaceable tokens and a Walmart gift card.

Law enforcement gained access to Mr. Lichtenstein’s wallet on 31 January after receiving a search warrant that gave them access to encrypted files in Mr. Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account.

The next day, investigators confiscated 94,636 Bitcoins remaining in this wallet, worth more than $3.6 billion, according to court documents. According to the Justice Department, a total of 119,754 Bitcoins, worth approximately $71 million, were stolen when Bitfinex was hacked in 2016, now worth more than $4.5 billion.

Kenneth A. Polite Jr., head of the Department of Justice crime division. He said in a statement that the arrest showed that “we will not allow cryptocurrency to become a safe haven for money laundering or a zone of lawlessness in our financial system.”

With more Americans buying and selling cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, regulators have placed some major exchanges in the United States under official surveillance.

But cryptocurrencies move through decentralized computer networks that are not under the control of a single government or company, so most trading takes place on largely unregulated exchanges like Bitfinex, which give consumers little information about their operations.

The lack of regulation has created a number of problems in the world of virtual currency exchanges, threatening to undermine consumer confidence in cryptocurrencies and slow widespread adoption. The first Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014 after hackers breached their security systems and stole $500 million in customer money.

And law enforcement brought criminal charges against persons who own exchanges and are suspected of facilitating criminal activity.



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