Tech Entrepreneur Ilya Lichtenstein Admits to Masterminding $4.5 Billion Bitcoin Heist
Tech entrepreneur Ilya Lichtensteind, a Russian-American citizen, has admitted to committing the original 2016 Bitfinex hack, CNBC reported.
Earlier, Lichtensteind and his wife Heather Morgan had confessed to attempting to launder $4.5 billion worth of Bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex.
Until Lichtenstein's admission on Thursday, it was not publicly known who had hacked Bitcoins from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016.
The couple was not charged with the hack itself.
The cyber crime duo’s attempts to launder ill-gotten gains traced back to 2016 hack.
The couple's criminal escapade took on a surreal twist as Heather Morgan, adopting the pseudonym "Razzlekhan," ventured into the world of rap music and tech entrepreneurship while escaping the law enforcement.
Her music videos and rap lyrics, peppered with expletives, painted a picture of a "bad-ass money maker" and a "crocodile of Wall Street."
Simultaneously, Forbes articles portrayed her as a thriving tech magnate, an "economist, serial entrepreneur, software investor, and rapper."
Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein, who is a skilled computer programmer, were orchestrating a sophisticated operation to launder their stolen fortune obtained from the infamous crypto exchange Bitfinex.
The couple meticulously divided the stolen Bitcoins into small amounts, routing them through thousands of different crypto wallets, all under false identities, court documents revealed.
These funds were further intertwined with other criminal cryptocurrency proceeds on the darknet marketplace Alphabay, used to acquire gold coins, and channeled through shell companies in a bid to legitimize their tainted gains.
However, their elaborate scheme began to unravel when investigators linked the couple
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