Liechtenstein Ilya

Main article: Russian hackers

Biography

2023: Guilty plea for money laundering

On August 3, 2023, Russian national Ilya Lichtenstein and his girlfriend Heather Morgan pleaded guilty to money laundering charges related to the theft of about 120,000 bitcoins in 2016 from Hong Kong's Bitfinex. The total amount of damage is approximately $4.5 billion.

Lichtenstein founded the marketing firm MixRank and the decentralized identification platform Endpass, and also owned an investment organization with a single member called Demandpath. Morgan was CEO of SalesFolk, a marketing firm.

Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan

Lichtenstein told the court that he gained access to the Bitfinex network using his own hacking tools and unnamed methods. Once in Bitfinex's information infrastructure, Liechtenstein initiated more than 2,000 fraudulent transactions that sent 119,754 bitcoins from Bitfinex to a cryptocurrency wallet it controlled, the case file said. After that, the US Department of Justice said, he tried to cover his tracks by deleting all credentials and access protocols. At the same time, Heather Morgan participated in the laundering of stolen funds, transferring them through a complex scheme of financial accounts.

Shortly before the couple's arrest, official documents say, the investigating authorities gained access to 1CGA4 's wallet by decrypting a file stored in Liechtenstein's cloud storage account. A list of 2,000 virtual currency addresses was found there - along with the corresponding private keys. Blockchain analysis confirmed that almost all of these addresses were directly related to the hack.

money laundering USA Liechtenstein faces up to 20 years in prison in connection with charges related to. Morgan pleaded guilty to two counts - money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud: each count carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.^[1]

2022: Detention in the United States on charges of stealing $71 million in bitcoins, which have since turned into $3.6 billion

In February 2022, US authorities seized about $3.6 billion in Bitcoin stolen during a break-in at Bitfinex in 2016 - the largest financial arrest in history - and arrested two people, the Justice Department said.

Russian Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, were detained on February 8 in the morning, the Justice Department said in a statement. The two allegedly conspired to launder 119,754 Bitcoin stolen after hacking into Bitfinex systems.

Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan

Bitfinex is an exchange associated with the world's largest stablecoin Tether. At the time of the hack, the volume of stolen cryptocurrency was estimated at about $71 million. The total value of the stolen Bitcoin for February 2022 is about $4.5 billion.

The US Internal Revenue Service gained access to files with the keys to the hackers' wallet. At the same time, hackers did not seek security - the keys lay in one text file in the cloud storage.

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