American
rapper, Heather ‘Razzlekhan’ Morgan, and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, have
entered into a plea agreement with US prosecutors, according to a court
document seen by Reuters. The couple was first arrested in February 2022 for
allegedly laundering cryptocurrency worth $4.5 billion stolen via a hack of the
digital asset platform, Bitfinex, in 2016.
According
to Reuters, the pair will appear before Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelley in
Washington on August 3, 2023, for a plea hearing. In its
action last year, the Department
of Justice (DoJ) charged
the couple with conspiracy
to commit money laundering and defraud the United States.
In August
2016, hackers stole over 119,000
bitcoins from
Bitfinex via thousands of unauthorized transactions. The stolen BTCs, which were priced at $71
million at the time, are worth about $3.5 billion at today’s BTC spot
market price.
Last year, the DoJ after the arrest of Morgan and Lichtenstein announced that it seized
about $3.6 billion in stolen digital assets directly linked to the hack.
However, prosecutors are now seeking to have the couple forfeit billions of
dollars in assets.
Bitfinex Continues Recovery Efforts
Meanwhile,
Finance Magnates reported that Bitfinex has
continued to maintain efforts to get back some of the stolen
cryptocurrencies. Last month, the exchange received $315,000 in cash and cryptocurrencies
from the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The
cryptocurrencies were seized by the US Customers and Border Protection, an
enforcement agency of the DHS.
Previously,
Bitfinex recovered little amounts of the stolen bitcoins. In 2021, the exchange retrieved 6.5 BTC worth $305,000 at the time through its partnership with another crypto trading platform, Poloniex. Similarly, Bitfinex in
February 2019 reclaimed 28 BTC worth over $107,000 from the US
government.
Meanwhile,
a recent report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
(OCCRP), a global network of investigative journalists, claimed that Bitfinex never made public a
confidential report that found its security lapses responsible for the 2016
hack. Reacting, dismissed the claims, calling them “factually incorrect.”
American
rapper, Heather ‘Razzlekhan’ Morgan, and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, have
entered into a plea agreement…
