"Bonny & Clyde" Of Crypto Arrested Over $4.5 Billion Bitcoin Hack

ndtv.com:

Heather Morgan (R) and Ilya Lichtenstein were detained on charges of conspiring to launder Bitcoins.

They are, to hear the feds tell it, a Bonnie and Clyde for the crypto age — made-for-TikTok personalities who broke bad, glamorously, right before their followers' eyes.

She billed herself as “The Crocodile of Wall Street” and “Razzlekhan,” a surrealist artist and rapper with tattooed hands and, she boasted, more pizzazz than Genghis Khan.

He assumed a tamer persona: that of a “tech entrepreneur” and “occasional magician” who'd proposed, in a social media moment, via flashing billboards in Times Square.

At 7 a.m. on Tuesday, their blingy world of TED talk-style salons and music videos collapsed around them when they were arrested by federal law enforcement officials in New York City and accused of a crime that would've seemed preposterous in a halcyon, pre-cryptocurrency era: enriching themselves off a cache of stolen Bitcoin that is today worth about $4.5 billion.

Heather Morgan, 31, and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, were detained on charges of conspiring to launder 119,754 Bitcoin. The digital currency, the authorities say, came from the 2016 hack of Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc.

At an initial appearance in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday evening, Morgan wore a white hooded sweatshirt, her long hair down. Lichtenstein, who goes by the nickname “Dutch,” showed up wearing jeans and a gray shirt. Neither wore shackles nor spoke publicly. Their lawyers — they have retained separate counsel — did the talking. The trial will eventually be held in Washington.

The judge granted both bail, setting a bond of $3 million for Morgan and asking her parents to post their home as security. For