The US authorities arrested Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, to whom the American press already baptized as the “Bonnie & Clyde of the Crypto Era”, by an alleged conspiracy cripple to whites billions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrencies during the hacking of the Bitfinex platform in 2016, the Justice Department announced.

According to judicial documents, Lichtenstein and Morgan allegedly collaborated in whitening the profits obtained with the 119,754 Bitcoins that were stolen from BitFinex and that through unauthorized transactions were sent to a digital wallet under the control of Lichtenstein.

The value of the Bitcoins stolen in 2016 would currently be $ 4.5 billion, compared to the only more than 71 million dollars when crypto assets were valued at the time of computer attack.

During the last five years, approximately 25,000 of these stolen Bitcoins were transferred from Lichtenstein’s wallet through a complicated money laundering process that ended with the deposit from the funds subtracted in accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan.

The rest of the stolen funds, which comprise more than 94,000 Bitcoins, with a current value of more than 3,600 million dollars remained in the wallet and have been seized by the FBI.

In this way, the operation represents “the largest financial seizure ever carried out by the Department of Justice,” according to the Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, who assured that it is shown that cryptocurrencies “are not a safe shelter for criminals.”

“We can track the money through ‘Blockchain’ and we will not allow cryptocurrencies to be a safe shelter for money laundering or an area of ​​anarchy within our financial system”, added Attorney General Kenneth A. Cortés.

K. Tovar.

Source: BI

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