Tech entrepreneur and rapper Heather Morgan, also known as ‘Razzlekhan,’ and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein pleaded guilty to money laundering charges at a hearing at the U.S. District Court in Washington on Thursday, CNBC reported.
Ilya Lichtenstein pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering for his role in the 2016 Bitfinex hack, which saw hundreds of thousands of bitcoin stolen.
At the time of their arrest, the Department of Justice seized $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin which is believed to be connected to the 2016 hack.
“Bitfinex diligently worked with the U.S. Department of Justice to identify the perpetrators of the hack, recover the stolen bitcoin, and bring the hackers to justice,” an external spokesperson for Bitfinex told CoinDesk. “After seven years, those efforts have come to fruition.”
According to the Department of Justice, Lichtenstein “used a number of advanced hacking tools and techniques” to break into Bitfinex’s system.
Lichtenstein and Morgan were arrested in February 2022 after federal agents seized about 94,000 bitcoin traced to the hack from the wallets owned by them.
At that time, the funds were worth $3.6 billion, and since then investigators have recovered another $475 million worth of funds related to the hack. Federal prosecutors said the seizure was the Justice Department’s largest monetary seizure in history.
In all, nearly 120,000 Bitcoin were stolen, worth about $71 million at the time of the heist.
Also Read: Bitfinex Strikes Back: $314K Recovered from 2016 Bitcoin Hack
