Ilya Lichtenstein, the hacker at present serving a five-year jail sentence for stealing billions of {dollars} price of Bitcoin from crypto change Bitfinex, despatched a message right this moment from his jail cell: It was all his fault, and his spouse shouldn’t be punished for his misdeeds.
Lichtenstein’s spouse, Heather Morgan—maybe higher identified by her rapping moniker “Razzlekhan”—was herself sentenced to 18 months in a U.S. jail for serving to her husband launder the stolen funds.
Final fall, Morgan admitted in federal court docket that she used numerous techniques to cover the haul of Bitcoin price about $11.6 billion by right this moment’s costs—together with changing the crypto into gold cash and burying them.
In a jail video name posted to X (previously often known as Twitter) on Thursday, Lichtenstein claimed that his spouse had no information of the Bitfinex hack for years and was not concerned in it in any manner.
“Whereas it’s true that my spouse pleaded responsible to laundering a small portion of the funds, she was by no means concerned within the hack itself,” he stated, showing at occasions to be studying off of notes. “In some ways my spouse, who I really like so, a lot, is simply one other sufferer of my unhealthy selections.”
Within the background of the video, one other inmate seems to partially take away his shirt and rub his abdomen for a number of seconds.
The video was accompanied by the hashtag “#FreeRazzlekhan.”
Since receiving her sentence final month, Morgan, aka Razzlekhan, has included her journey by America’s authorized system into her music. Earlier this month, she launched a monitor detailing the battle of being incarcerated and separated from her husband throughout the lead-up to their sentencing.
Morgan has but to report back to jail to serve out her sentence. She has, within the meantime, spent her days making paid movies on Cameo.
On Thursday, Morgan reposted her husband’s jail video assertion, saying it pushed again in opposition to “false claims” made in a current Netflix documentary in regards to the Bitfinex hack. The movie described Morgan and Lichtenstein as a “cringey couple” out of “a nasty spy novel.”
Lichtenstein, for his half, additionally appears wanting to get out from behind bars. In Thursday’s video, he made the case that he needs to be valued for his experience and employed to thwart different hackers.
“I’ve a specific set of expertise,” Liechtenstein stated, in an obvious reference to the 2008 Liam Neeson movie Taken. “And I imagine I can use these expertise to do quite a lot of good within the cybersecurity business.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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