US hacker sentenced to five years in the slammer for laundering the proceeds of nearly 120,000 stolen bitcoin worth $10,800,000,000 at today’s prices

Cyber heists have lost some of the romance of the old-fashioned kind, haven’t they? Give me a stripey sweater and a swag bag any day of the week.

Still, they appear to be far more lucrative than your old-fashioned Dog Day Afternoon histrionics, as a US hacker has just been sentenced to five years hard time for his role in the theft of 120,000 bitcoin, which would equate to just under $10.8 billion’s worth of the cryptocash today.

Ilya Lichtenstein pled guilty to money laundering charges brought against him for the 2016 Bitfinex cryptocurrency hack, in which nearly 120,000 of precious Bitcoin was swiped off the exchange over the course of more than 2,000 fraudulent transactions (via BBC News). Lichtenstein is said to have enlisted the help of his wife, Heather Morgan, to launder the ill-gotten gains using a variety of methods, but both were apprehended in 2022.

The couple utilised a complicated network of fictitious online accounts, automated transactions, and dark web marketplaces to convert the cryptohaul into what they hoped would be untraceable funds, including exchanging a portion of them for gold coins.

Morgan herself seems to have been less than discrete about her ballooning income, as she posted multiple hip hop videos under the alias Razzlekhan, calling herself “the infamous crocodile of Wall Street” who’s “more fearless and shameless than ever before.”

Morgan is currently out on bail and is scheduled to be sentenced on November 18.

At the time of the theft, 120,000 bitcoin would have been worth around $71 billion, but thanks to the, err, unpredictable nature of the crypto market, it was worth more than $4.5 billion at the time of the couple’s arrest. That figure has ballooned since the most recent Bitcoin price surge, and at the time of writing would be worth approximately 10.8 billion dollars.

That may have changed by tomorrow, or indeed in the next five minutes. Crypto be crazy, y’all.

Quite the lucrative haul then, and they would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for that meddling, err, US government. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the time of the arrests that the financial seizure was the biggest in the history of the US Department of Justice.

It just goes to show, crime doesn’t pay. Or rather it might, briefly, before the full weight of the DOJ comes tumbling down on your heads and your wife’s hip hop career starts going viral for boasting about your financial prowess. There’s probably a lesson to be learned here, but I’ll be darned if I can find it.