Admitting his guilt as the bitcoin hacker in the 2016 attack on Bitfinex, a New York man has pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to launder stolen cryptocurrencies with a final value of $4.5 billion.
The guilty plea by Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein in Washington was made before his wife, Heather Rhiannon Morgan, who was expected to appear in the same court for her own hearing.
Until Thursday’s confession in court by Lichtenstein, it was not publicly known who had stolen the bitcoins from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.
At the time of their arrest, officials seized more than 94,000 bitcoins, which at the time were worth approximately $3.6 billion. This is also the largest financial seizure in the department’s history.
The separate hearings of the Crypto couple, as reported in the US media, were moved from their originally scheduled times on Thursday due to Donald Trump’s lawsuit being heard later in the afternoon in the same court.
A document filed last month against the couple says that in early 2107 Lichtenstein “began moving a portion of the bitcoin” stolen in the hack “in a series of small, complex transactions across multiple accounts and platforms.”
This “shuffle”, which created a huge number of transactions, was designed to conceal “the trail of stolen funds,” according to testimony from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Prosecutors wrote that in February 2018, Lichtenstein and Morgan set up an account at a U.S. financial institution for their company, Endpass.
“In fact, Lichtenstein and Morgan used the account to launder the proceeds of the Bitfinex hack,” according to the documents.
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