A Washington D.C., court docket sentenced Heather Morgan to 18 months in jail for her function in laundering cash tied to the 2016 Bitfinex hack.
Morgan, additionally identified by her rap persona “Razzlekhan,” pleaded responsible in August to conspiracy costs associated to cash laundering and defrauding the US authorities.
Each Perpetrators within the Bitfinex Hack are Now Behind Bars
District Court docket Decide Colleen Kollar-Kotelly delivered the sentence on Morgan’s trial earlier as we speak November 18. She was arrested again in 2022 along with her husband in Manhattan. When the trial started, Morgan confronted at the least 5 years on a number of costs of cash laundering and conspiracy.
Nevertheless, she was granted a decreased sentence earlier as we speak due to her intensive help to the prosecutors.
“The DoJ has new authorized principle for catching cash launderers: charging them with ‘a conspiracy to defraud FinCEN.’ And it was first used within the case in opposition to crypto hackers Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan,” wrote monetary historian John Paul Koning on X (previously Twitter)
Morgan’s husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, masterminded the theft of 119,754 Bitcoin, valued at practically $10 billion at as we speak’s worth. Whereas Morgan didn’t take part within the Bitfinex hack, she helped Lichtenstein conceal the stolen crypto.
Prosecutors described how the couple used faux identities, small incremental transfers, and a number of crypto exchanges to obscure the funds’ origins. In addition they purchased NFTs, gold, and reward playing cards with the stolen Bitcoin from Bitfinex.
Based on Bloomberg experiences, Morgan was in a position to solely launder 21% of the stolen Bitcoin. She additionally made a number of transactions with the Bitfinex funds on the darkish net to additional conceal the path.
Earlier this week, Lichtenstein was additionally sentenced to 5 years in jail. This was, nevertheless, far under his potential 20-year most, as he additionally cooperated considerably with the authorities. His cooperation and lack of prior legal report apparently performed a major function within the decreased sentence.
The 2016 Bitfinex hack stays one of many largest cryptocurrency thefts in historical past. Hollywood is ready to dramatize the case within the upcoming movie ‘Dutch & Razzlekhan’, starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Morgan.
The film will discover the duo’s transformation from aspiring entrepreneurs to convicted criminals, with Lewis Pullman and Ariana DeBose rounding out the forged.
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