Wu said the author | Colin Wu
This issue is edited | Colin Wu
Wu said that in the early morning of February 9, Beijing time, the US Department of Justice disclosed that two people were arrested in Manhattan on the morning of February 8 on suspicion of conspiracy to launder cryptocurrencies, which were stolen in a hacking attack on virtual currency exchange Bitfinex in 2016 and are currently worth about $4.5 billion. Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, who was arrested, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, both live in New York City, New York. Lichtenstein and Morgan are charged with conspiracy to launder money, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government with up to 5 years in prison. But they were (strangely) not accused of hacking. Since at least last November, the defendants had been "aware" of the investigation after one of their service providers received a subpoena, but had not fled before being arrested. The two are currently released on bail for $5 million and $3 million.
In 2016, 119,756 bitcoins were stolen from Bitfinex user accounts, making it the second largest bitcoin theft after the Mr Gox theft. Affected by this, Bitcoin plunged 23% on the day. After the theft in 2016, the exchange offered BFX Tokens to all affected users. Each token represents a loss of $1. These BFX start trading on Bitfinex at less than $0.20 and gradually appreciate to nearly $1. Monthly redemptions begin on September 1, 2016, with the last BFX redeemed in early April 2017. More than 52 million BFX converted to iFinex Inc. in a 1:1 ratio of stocks. of stocks. It was rumored in the market that Bit Zhao Dong became a minority shareholder of Bitfinex at that time.
After hacking Into Bitfinex's systems and initiating more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions, Lichtenstein and Morgan conspired to launder the proceeds of 119,754 Bitcoins stolen from the Bitfinex platform. These unauthorized transactions will be sent to a digital wallet under Lichtenstein's control by the stolen bitcoins. Over the past five years, about 25,000 stolen bitcoins have been transferred out of Lichtenstein's wallet through a complex money laundering process, and some of the stolen funds have been deposited into financial accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan. The rest of the stolen funds, including more than 94,000 bitcoins, remain in the wallet used to receive and store the hackers' illegal proceeds. After enforcing a court-authorized search warrant on an online account controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, agents gained access to Chinese of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein. The files contained the private keys needed to access the digital wallet needed to receive stolen funds directly from Bitfinex and allowed agents to legally seize and recover more than 94,000 bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex. At the time of seizure, the recovered bitcoins were worth more than $3.6 billion. (On February 1, according to Whale Alert, the stolen money wallet of 64,633 BTC in the 2016 Bitfinex theft was transferred to an unknown wallet, suspected to be the US Department of Justice's continuous removal of funds))
The criminal proceedings allege that Lichtenstein and Morgan used a number of sophisticated money laundering techniques, including the use of virtual identities to establish online accounts; the use of computer programs to automate transactions, a money laundering technique that allows many transactions to be made in a short period of time; depositing stolen funds into accounts on various virtual currency exchanges and dark web marketplaces and then withdrawing funds to obfuscate the traces of transaction history by disrupting the flow of funds; and converting Bitcoin into other forms of virtual currency. This includes virtual currencies (AECs) that enhance anonymity; and the use of U.S. business accounts to legalize their banking activities.
CoinDesk's investigation and courtroom argument records reveal more personal information about the two men: Lichtenstein, who was born in Russia, came to the United States at the age of 6, holds a Russian passport, and is an alumnus of the famous Silicon Valley accelerator program Y Combinator; with initial funding, he co-founded a data and ad tech startup called MixRank, which received funding from people like Mark Cuban. Occasionally, Lichtenstein warns people of the threat of hackers on Twitter.
His wife, Morgan, is a young marketing entrepreneur and rapper with many bylines in business magazines, graduated from the University of California, Davis, earned a Master of Arts in International Economic Development from the American University in Cairo, and studied Turkish monetary policy at Bilkent University in Ankara. At the age of 23, she started a company called SalesFolk, which uses steady copywriters to send emails to companies that want to market their goods on the Internet.
The Bitfinex statement states that we are pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice announced today that it has recovered most of the bitcoin stolen during the August 2016 security breach. We have been working extensively with the DOJ since it began its investigation and will continue to do so. Bitfinex will work with the DOJ and follow appropriate legal procedures to establish our right to return stolen Bitcoins. If Bitfinex receives stolen Bitcoins, as described in the LEO white paper, Bitfinex will repurchase and destroy leos within 18 months from the date of receipt of the recovery, using an amount equivalent to 80% of the recovered net funds. (Previously, Bitfinex issued the platform Token LEO in order to make up for the stolen funds gap, and the price of LEO soared due to the news on February 9) Industry insiders pointed out that Bitfinex, as an old-school traditional supporter of Bitcoin in the market, some market participants are worried that the smashing effect after receiving Bitcoin is almost impossible. Bitfinex is also working with El Salvador to issue bitcoin bonds.
In 2020 Bitfinex has stated that the person who connected the hacker for Bitfinex will receive 5% of the total property recovered, and the hacker (if the asset is returned) will receive 25% of the market value of the total property recovered. The community joked that hackers would have accepted the compromise earlier; others said whether to return 30% of the bitcoins to the U.S. Department of Justice.
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