In the United States, the Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that it had recovered more than 94,000 bitcoins stolen in 2016 from the Bitfinex trading platform and valued today at 3.6 billion dollars. A New York couple had managed to launder some of the stolen money, but the explosion in bitcoin prices made them more and more visible, and investigators managed to trace them.
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According to Deputy Prosecutor Lisa Monaco, it is the biggest catch in history: On Tuesday, the United States Department of Justice seized the sum of 3.6 billion dollars in bitcoins ! This sum comes from the hacking in 2016 of the exchange platform Bitfinexone of the references in the field, based in Hong-Kong.
Accused of money launderingsilver and tax evasion, but not yet hacking, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, were arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday morning after spending some of their money on gold NFT or even gift cards. Judge Debra Freeman set bail of $5 million for Lichtenstein and $3 million for Morgan, and she demanded that their parents mortgage their home as security.
Laundering billions in cryptocurrency is complicated…
Initially, this couple of “serial entrepreneurs”, as they define themselves, had seized about 120,000 bitcoins, and this sum in cryptocurrency was worth around $71 million 6 years ago. With the explosion of bitcoin, whose value exceeded the 42,000 dollars, their theft had turned into 4.5 billion dollars! ” As the value of the money increased, it arguably became a much more complex scheme than they thought, explains lawyer Rachel Fisetspecializing in complex financial fraud cases. It was going to catch up with them at some point because the pot just kept getting bigger. You can’t just keep a few billion dollars for five years without getting noticed. »
According to the documents recovered by the justice, the couple actually managed to launder only 20% of the sum stolen, and it is for this reason that the investigators recovered only 3.6 billion dollars on virtual wallets owned by the couple. It is by accessing the files of the platform AlphaBay, a darkweb version of eBay, that investigators managed to trace the stolen funds. Lichtenstein had the bad idea to use his name for his account…
Account keys hidden in the cloud
Prosecutors said they had been tracking the money for years and were finally able to recover it after obtaining a search warrant for a cloud account held by the couple, where investigators found the keys to hundreds of crypto accounts containing the approximately $3.6 billion of stolen money.
In addition, the two scammers had also tried to launder money via a foreign exchange network in conjunction with several of their start-ups created in different sectors of new technologies. Ironically, one of their companies provided advice for “ protect your business against cybercriminals “.
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