US man pleads guilty to laundering crypto stolen from Bitfinex hack
A NEW York technology entrepreneur pleaded guilty on Thursday (Aug 3) to laundering funds stolen from Bitfinex, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, with his wife, an online rapper, expected to follow.
Ilya Lichtenstein entered his plea at a hearing before US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington.
His wife Heather Morgan, who used the hip-hop alias “Razzlekhan” to promote her music, is expected to enter her own plea later on Thursday. She faces an additional count of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Lichtenstein and Morgan had been arrested in February 2022 on charges of laundering more than 100,000 Bitcoin that was stolen after a hacker attacked Bitfinex in 2016.
The Bitcoin was worth US$71 million at the time, but had appreciated to more than US$4.5 billion by the time of their arrests.
Deputy Attorney-General Lisa Monaco said at the time that the US$3.6 billion in assets that prosecutors recovered from the couple was the biggest financial seizure in US Department of Justice history.
Prosecutors want the couple to forfeit US$3 billion. A docket entry in late July showed that Lichtenstein and Morgan reached their plea deal with the US attorney’s office in Washington. REUTERS
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