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You're watching CNBC On Demand.
In this episode of American Greed.
Billions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency.
Someone's laundering a crypto fortune.
Is it a genius hacker? A state -sponsored terrorist?
After six mysterious years, the alleged launderer is unmasked.
This is the craziest story of the day, so here we go.
Heather Morgan, a businesswoman, social media influencer, and journalist
with a bizarre alter ego called Russell Carr.
She thought herself as a real entrepreneur, making things happen.
Her husband, Elia Lichtenstein, a budding tech mogul.
He was like an opportunist and a greedy one.
They've got it all. And they love nothing more than to flaunt it online.
Ugh!
We called them the Bonnie and Clyde of crypto.
I'm missing his knuckle.
Yeah, I want to be a mogul. They were either really brilliant or really
Or just crazy.
The government says this crypto odd couple laundered $4 .5 billion in stolen
Bitcoin. smashing records.
This is the largest seizure of cryptocurrency ever by U .S. law
American Greed takes you inside the investigation and online with the self
-styled crocodile of Wall Street while the case is still unfolding.
Hey, we have an announcement, an update. Could she and her husband have razzle
-dazzled one of the boldest?
And strangest digital crimes of all time. The notion that they could be
laundering $4 .5 billion worth of Bitcoin blew people's minds.
Cryptocurrency.
A fledgling market of digital coins just a decade ago that has exploded into a
trillion -dollar industry.
Some people ask, like, is this a new frontier in finance, or is it some kind
goofy, Beanie Babies -type phenomenon? And the truth is that it's both. The
overall crypto market broke $2 trillion this month. The market grows so quickly
that law enforcement can barely keep up.
Cryptocurrency is kind of the Wild West in terms of regulation.
There's a lot of room for criminal actors.
In this new frontier of digital scammers, one of crypto's most notorious
occurs on August 2nd, 2016, when someone hacks a virtual currency exchange
called Bitfinex.
It was hacked for 119 ,754 Bitcoin.
And this was actually a really startling event.
Trading on the digital currency exchange was suspended after that breach was
discovered. The stolen currency is worth $71 million at the time.
Stealing all those funds is a curse in many ways because this was obviously a
huge amount and one that was certainly going to attract the attention of United
States law enforcement.
So who has the skills, guts, or foolishness to commit such a brazen
The crypto industry boomed despite the Bitfinex hack, especially in the Bay
Area, where Heather Morgan, who presents herself like many other young strivers,
dreams of launching the next big thing.
Morgan's come a long way from her humble Northern California roots in Tehama,
California, a town of 400 people.
Growing up, I did not have a lot of friends.
She reflects on her childhood in a video posted on her YouTube channel, one of
nearly a dozen social media accounts.
in which Morgan shares intimate details of her life. You have 20 kids in the
class, and they've all known each other from first through eighth grade, and
you're kind of weird and different.
You're going to get bullied mercilessly. She said that she didn't really ever
fit in.
She had a speech impediment, and sometimes she would get bullied, and
just didn't have, like, this ambition that she had.
And I remember thinking, the ocean.
Yeah, it's big, but I'm a shark. I belong in the ocean, not in a mud puddle
pond. Morgan leaves behind the mud puddle and has no intentions of ever
returning.
She earns scholarships to the University of California, Davis, graduating in
just three years with a degree in economics and international relations.
She documents her travels to Asia and the Middle East.
And begins collaborating after graduation with an economics professor
Travis Libert on an academic paper.
She had a very quick mind. She was very professional, you know, very put
together, very aware of her image, all in the way that you would expect of an
aspiring young professional.
Though they communicate through Skype and email, Morgan's ambition cuts
cyberspace. There was kind of a restlessness to her, always kind of
the next thing.
She saw herself as a real entrepreneur, as someone who was, like, making things
happen. After their eight -month collaboration ends, Libra agrees to
Morgan a letter of recommendation to PhD programs in economics.
But she never takes him up on it.
Looking back, I mean, the one thing that does stand out is her signature block
had evolved over that brief period, and under her name was Economist
Entrepreneur Hustler.
Morgan closes the chapter on academia to pursue more lucrative ventures.
She had basically told a friend, I need to go home and make money.
So she comes back to Silicon Valley in the startup entrepreneur space.
Morgan meets a mild -mannered Russian -born entrepreneur named Ilya Dutch
Lichtenstein. He's almost the polar opposite of Heather Morgan.
He doesn't seem to want attention.
Nor could their backgrounds be more different.
Lichtenstein grows up in an affluent Chicago suburb called Glenview.
His parents had immigrated from Russia to avoid religious persecution.
Lichtenstein meets Charles Austin in a computer coding class at Glenbrook South
High School.
I mean, I would say Glenbrook South is a pretty typical suburban high school
where you have some of like the sort of John Hughes archetypal tropes of like
jocks, nerds, etc.
We're definitely obviously nerds, right?
We're not football quarterbacks here.
And I think he's sort of underrated as, like, a funny guy because he was
probably very quiet and kept to himself.
But once you start to, like, get to know him, it's like, oh, yeah, I really like
this guy. He's cool.
They aren't jocks, but they still like to have a good time.
Me and whoever was in our, like, lunch group at the time would just drive over
to my place.
and play poker for, like, 40 minutes, keep that game set up, and then come
the next day and keep playing until we finish the game.
There was nothing remarkable about him as a poker player.
Like, it's not like he was like, oh, damn, he's running the table.
But again, he just, like, fit right in, and it was, like, fun to play with him.
Yeah, well, this is something we just stumbled on here.
Photos of 2006 prom from the very end of high school.
And it's very funny that the comment on these two photos from a friend of his
is, Ilya with a date? I don't believe it.
I skipped prom to play poker, so it's news to me that he went to it.
Lichtenstein majors in psychology at the University of Wisconsin and heads to
San Francisco after graduation.
He tries his hand at several fruitless ventures, including a Ron Paul website
and a brain supplement business.
He also had a couple of other websites that were sort of in the dating realm,
one called Adult Friend Grinder and another one called
FindGeekGirls .com.
So my name is Ilya Lichtenstein. I'm the co -founder of a service called
MixRank. Lichtenstein's fortune improves when he launches a marketing company
called MixRank, getting seed money from backers like Mark Cuban.
Lichtenstein's luck changes on the romantic front, too.
He finds a soulmate in Morgan who shares his entrepreneurial drive and sense of
adventure. So it seems like they did start, like, jet -setting pretty soon
they met each other.
There's photos of the two of them together in, like, a private jet,
the tarmac, him hanging out with a monkey in Hong Kong.
She has qualities that he doesn't have. She is more social and outgoing.
You would expect her to be the big entrepreneur before him because she is
willing to put herself in front of everybody and, like, make a sort of
out of herself in a way that he never would.
Morgan channels her wits and moxie into her own startup, a company called
Salesfolk, that helps businesses craft cold email pitches.
That was one of the skills that she seemed to be the proudest of because she
would send cold emails or finesse her way into connecting with people and
getting what she wanted.
The company motto captures Morgan's towering ambition.
I mean, it's like comically meme worthy.
Goat is obviously the greatest of all time.
Clearly, even in fashioning her branding, she was really leaning into
of underbelly of Silicon Valley that's like the weirdest, the boldest.
So my first question for you is... Lichtenstein offers advice to Morgan and
for an interview on her company's YouTube channel, while she offhandedly
friends a hint of what he may really be up to.
Heather introduced him as a black hat hacker.
A black hat hacker is a type of hacker that pursues exploits with malicious
intent.
So they not only have these wild sides, but then I think they probably foster
that in each other and sort of feed off of that.
Morgan posts a testament to her boyfriend in August 2016.
I will always love getting into trouble with this crazy guy.
The Bitfinette hack occurs one day later.
And someone's about to start laundering all that stolen crypto.
Up next on American Greed, Morgan unleashes a brash alter ego.
But could her lyrics reveal a little too much?
It's one of the biggest cryptocurrency heists ever.
120 ,000 bitcoins, then worth $71 million, drained from accounts in the
virtual currency exchange in August 2016.
The hackers stashed the currency in a digital wallet, a virtual account
by a set of private keys, like a PIN code.
Whoever had the private keys, they were the only person who was going to be able
to do anything with that money inside.
But there's a catch.
All that loot is hiding in plain sight.
Bitcoin was once touted as anonymous, but every transaction gets permanently
logged on the blockchain, a public ledger maintained by computer networks.
The strange thing about a cryptocurrency theft is that you can see that these
120 ,000 bitcoins worth of fortune have moved into a specific address, but they
don't know who the thieves are. It's like just beyond their reach.
It's a crime unlike any other Ali Watkins has covered on the New York
Metro beat.
It was like a huge bank robbery happened, but then the money just sat
the bank in a locked getaway card. And no one could touch it. No one could
it. No one could figure out who put it there in the first place.
And it just sort of had this lore around it.
A small portion of bitcoins begin flowing five months after the hack.
Jonathan Levin co -founded Chainalysis, a company that helps governments and
banks solve high -profile crypto crimes.
Money started to move through lots of different intermediary wallets, and
ended up going into Alphabay.
Alphabay was a dark web marketplace, so that's essentially like an Amazon .com,
but for bad things.
You could buy drugs.
stolen credit cards, you could pay for money laundering services, and you could
even buy poison if you wanted to kill someone.
It also offered mixing and tumbling services.
These are services in which you, John Doe, can send your dirty cryptocurrency
to Alphabay, and Alphabay will then mix it up with other funds that have been
sent to it.
So it kind of acts, if you imagine, taking your dirty cash, putting it into
washing machine.
Meanwhile, Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein are growing restless.
Morgan struggles to keep sales folk profitable, while Lichtenstein suddenly
moves on from his startup, MixRank.
The couple exchanges the California sunshine for Manhattan's bright lights.
Morgan and Lichtenstein rent a $6 ,500 a month apartment on Wall Street.
She furnishes it with animal pelts and taxidermy, including a crocodile skull.
Detailing this and nearly every facet of her life with Lichtenstein on TikTok
and other social media.
This is my current look. What do you think?
It reminded you of that really quirky art friend who everybody says has good
taste. but you're afraid to tell them they actually have really bad taste.
Morgan branches into journalism, contributing dozens of columns to Inc.
and Forbes.
She just sort of willed herself into this expert space.
How did she do that? She started writing as if she was an expert, as if she was
an entrepreneur, as if she was successful.
I made my own path as being both a writer, a software entrepreneur.
and creative.
Nearly a year after the Bitfinex hack, Morgan and Lichtenstein are hardly a
on the Justice Department's radar.
But that's about to change.
Today, the Department of Justice announced the takedown of the dark web
alpha base.
In July 2017,
Federal authorities shut down Alphabay.
This is the largest dark market web place takedown in world history.
Law enforcement seizes Alphabay's main server in Lithuania.
And so suddenly, this thing that had been a kind of, I don't know, a black
in the middle of the blockchain is in the hands of the Fed, and they can see
the transactions.
According to a complaint later filed, the trove of illicit transactions will
lead directly to morgan and lichtenstein alpha bay offered money laundering
services and the records associated with his money laundering services may have
played an important role in allowing the government to connect the stolen
Bitcoin in this case to Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan.
I think that when that Alphabet server ended up in federal law enforcement's
hands, that was probably the beginning of the end.
I feel like I live in two worlds. But as the feds close in, Morgan hardly lays
low.
Instead, she announces a new career after complaining of professional
I think I was pretty unhappy.
So she started rapping as a way to deal with the burnout.
Morgan creates a shameless alter ego.
She's running all over Wall Street in these insane outfits.
She's making obscene...
gestures in like very buttoned up areas of New York and broad daylight.
While Razzlecon apparently shells out big bucks on rap videos, IRS agents
dissect the blockchain, inching closer to identifying suspects they believe are
laundering the stolen money in one of crypto's biggest heists. Not only do
blockchains not lie, no matter how they're designed.
Cybercrime in general is difficult because there are little breadcrumbs
left everywhere unless you're the perfect criminal.
Lichtenstein certainly seems to know his way around the blockchain.
In March 2018, he forms EndPass, a cyber company intended to secure
personal assets.
We protect your funds with multiple layers of security.
You know, they didn't appear to have much traction.
Their businesses were certainly not ones that would generate a ton of income.
Morgan and Lichtenstein's companies may not be earning much, but that doesn't
stop them from jetting off to exotic locations on a moment's whim.
Their 2019 summer itinerary includes a month in a place that's not a typical
tourist hotspot, Ukraine.
But are Morgan and Lichtenstein merely on vacation?
Or up to something far more suspicious.
Up next on American Greed.
The government compares this trip to a spinoff.
It's been three long years since one of cryptocurrency's most notorious heists.
Hackers stole nearly 120 ,000 bitcoins from the Bitfinex virtual currency
exchange and stashed them inside a digital wallet.
Someone's been laundering the currency by siphoning a portion through a dark
website called Alphabay.
But that's just one of many tactics uncovered by the IRS.
Another branch of it, though, that's more mysterious goes into a
called Monero.
Monero is a secure, private, untraceable currency.
It is open source, decentralized, and freely accessible to all.
What we see oftentimes in criminal investigations is that criminals who are
sophisticated use multiple different forms of cryptocurrency and sometimes
between different cryptocurrencies in order to try and obfuscate the flow of
funds. Exchanging one form of crypto for another is a laundering technique
called chain hopping.
And Monero is generally thought to be pretty untraceable. The IRS has never
revealed it can trace Monero, but Andy Greenberg thinks the Bitfinex
investigation may show it can.
And the government reportedly has some help.
There is an entire industry now of companies who pull apart these
follow the money.
I would be very surprised if Chainalysis was not involved in this massive
Bitfinex case.
Chainalysis co -founder Jonathan Levin declined to comment on whether his
company assisted the government's investigation.
While authorities say the digital clues left in the blockchain will eventually
lead to Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein's doorstep, the luxury
lavish travel, and elaborate rap videos displayed in their numerous online posts
reveal a lifestyle that appears to be far beyond what their small businesses
provide.
And yet, they show no sign of slowing down.
Lichtenstein announces their engagement on Facebook that summer.
It's like the most groan -worthy proposal I can think of.
He describes hiring an advertising agency to help him propose to my best
and the woman of my dream.
Ilya took Heather Morgan to Times Square where he had put all of these
billboards up about Rosalcon, who was clearly this alter ego that meant a lot
her. The proposal doesn't come cheap.
A Times Square billboard can run from $5 ,000 up to $50 ,000.
The next month, Morgan delivers a curious speech at a New York City salon
series, bragging about having the skills one might need to pull off a crime like
the one the feds are now investigating.
She had a lot of skills of persuasion and she used them for all kinds of
and purposes. I mean, some of the things that she was talking about was, you
know, like crashing people's weddings and stuff like that, or figuring out a
to talk to like a famous person or, you know, things like that.
Still, a skill is a skill.
The Justice Department later says Morgan and Lichtenstein weren't simply wedding
crashers. They used their skills to launder billions of dollars of Bitcoin
stolen from Bitfinex.
The government points to a trip that Morgan and Lichtenstein took to Kiev,
Ukrainian capital, later that summer.
The government compared this trip to a spy novel.
It seemed to be kind of their test balloon of, you know, how can we get
identities delivered?
One package was reportedly delivered to a hotel from Vladivostok, Russia, on
September 9th.
The Justice Department alleges Lichtenstein created files with detailed
information about Russian personas the very next day.
The implication is that they had ordered fake identity documents to be sent to
them in the Ukraine.
that potentially they could use if they ever had to flee the United States.
The whole thing is always just a knife's edge away of either being James Bond
or knockoff Austin Powers.
They were either really brilliant or really stupid or just crazy.
Back in Manhattan, Morgan and Lichtenstein resume business as usual.
He launches an investment firm called Demand Path.
Morgan expands her digital footprint, pushing content across social media.
Another interesting part about her Forbes profile is her bio.
She writes, when she's not reverse engineering black markets to think of
ways to combat fraud and cybercrime, she enjoys rapping and designing streetwear
fashion. She wrote an article, experts share tips to protect your business from
cybercriminals. In light of her warning, Razzlecon's new rap video contains
lyrics that sound rather ironic.
Fishing in general is where someone will try to get you to hand your password
over to them so that they can, in this case, transfer your funds.
Rewind that. What? Did you really just say that? Like, rewind that and play it
again. Make sure we heard that right.
All this
time, the value of the Bitcoin stolen from Bitman X
soars. from $71 million in August 2016 to nearly $3 .5 billion
in January 2021.
And federal authorities are now convinced Heather Morgan and Ilya
are the ones laundering the crypto.
Up next on American Greed, Morgan and Lichtenstein head to the altar with the
feds right on their heels.
Four years after someone began laundering Bitcoin stolen from the
virtual currency exchange, Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein seemed to
thriving, at least to friends and family in their hometowns.
The handful of people that I've kept in touch with at high school, they
definitely saw him as successful. Like, this guy is making money and doing his
thing and doing well, yeah.
projecting an image of success on social media isn't a crime but morgan takes it
to a whole different level but i also i'm a writer i'm a rapper i designed
streetwear fashion and a bunch of other stuff with surrealistic art so i right
now am basically living my ideal life that's it razzle dazzle she does this
gesture a lot like she goes like this a lot and be sure to razzle dazzle
It's like not a pretty look, and she loves it.
She, I think, was trying to shock people. She would talk about gilfs.
Grandmothers, I'd like to. You can fill in the blank on that.
Grandmother, I'd like to.
Baby grandma, but still the same gimbal.
More nimble than a gimbal.
Telling you delicious, looking so delicious.
Morgan's constant urge to broadcast every facet of her life can grate on her
more reserved fiancé.
And in some of the videos, he can seem a little bit uncomfortable with being on
camera.
I do still
wonder, like, where did that actually come from? Like, who was
she when nobody was TikToking her?
She was.
really loved by this small group of friends and people spoke very highly of
said she was a very loyal friend said she was there for them during some
traumatic life experiences so you wonder how much of it was just escalated for
clicks and for online attention
I see an individual who seems to be somewhat detached from reality.
And appears to me to be someone who would be likely to get involved in
like this.
Their view of the world doesn't quite match up with...
How others see it. Your real self is always your best self. Those will stay
awkward and weird.
Morgan and Lichtenstein don't seem to realize time is running out.
In a government complaint, the IRS shows how it traced the flow of stolen
Bitfinex Bitcoin through several virtual currency exchanges and foreign email
addresses.
to financial and business accounts belonging to Lichtenstein & Morgan,
their company's sales folks, demand paths, and end paths.
They cast out of about $2 .9 million worth of the money. As far as I can
think they largely spent it on themselves.
Investigators connect the laundered crypto to purchases made in Lichtenstein
Morgan's names for Uber, Hotels .com, Sony PlayStation, and a $500
Walmart card.
So these were very small expenses, not, you know, buying expensive cars or
buying a yacht or buying a house, but rather the types of expenses that are
indicative of someone who's desperate, who can't actually monetize the large
amount of funds that they have.
It's actually probably easier to just put stacks of $100 bills in a washing
machine and launder them through a casino than it is to launder $3 billion
anonymous.
hacked Bitcoin.
The government obtained a search warrant for Morgan and Lichtenstein's email
accounts in August 2021 while they're busy planning their wedding.
Hey, we have an announcement.
The fiancés catch wind of the subpoena in a notice from their internet service
provider.
It didn't seem to concern them because they go and throw this huge wedding
anyway. This is not your typical wedding. This is more like a concert, a
festival. Morgan is no blushing bride at their Los Angeles wedding.
She's carried into the ceremony on a royal bed and performs one of her
raps.
But their honeymoon is short.
They've been married less than two months when surprise visitors show up.
Up next on American Greed, the feds hunt for evidence, and they claim the
crocodile of Wall Street has no intention of going down without a fight.
They had $40 ,000 worth of cash and plastic bags with electronics inside,
the bag was labeled Spurner Phone.
One more greed.
Follow us on Instagram, connect on Facebook, and listen to the American
podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
We'll be right back.
Federal agents execute a search warrant at Heather Morgan and Ilya
Lichtenstein's apartment on January 5th, 2022.
According to the government, they seize a trove of evidence implicating the
couple in a scheme to launder stolen Bitcoin.
They had $40 ,000 worth of cash and plastic bags with electronics inside,
and the bag was labeled burner phone.
Agents also find two books with compartments cut into their pages.
They're empty.
But the government suspects this couple hatched an escape plan and accuses
Morgan of doing whatever she can to cover their tracks.
And as they're going through this apartment, Heather goes to get their
Clarissa, get your yellow blue.
As she's going to get the cat from under the bed, she actually pivots and grabs
her phone and tries to lock her phone.
And they struggled.
They had to, like, wrest it out of her hand.
The intention, obviously, being that Heather knew that if she locked the
it would be a lot harder for government agents to get into it. Federal
authorities are more interested in encrypted files on Lichtenstein's cloud
storage account.
The government suspects they hold the keys to solving a six -year -old crime.
Private keys linked to a digital wallet containing Bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex
in 2016.
The bizarre thing about Bitcoin is that you can like see the money right there
and you can't do anything with it. You can't retrieve it until you have those
keys. While the government tries to decrypt Lichtenstein's files, he and
hire attorneys at a white -shoe law firm called Cahill.
Despite their legal troubles, Razzleton keeps on tweeting.
It's very possible that the defendants believe that that encryption was strong
enough to protect them from any law enforcement investigation.
And yet the government says it breaks the encryption on Lichtenstein's files
within weeks.
They find exactly what they're seeking, according to a criminal complaint, a
list of private keys to the digital wallet associated with the Bitfinex
The IRS says the wallet still contains nearly 95 ,000 of the 120 ,000 Bitcoins
stolen from Bitfinex six years earlier.
But that's not all they reportedly find in Lichtenstein's files.
They found the document of him searching for Russian and Ukrainian nationalities
in passports.
They found the spreadsheet of all the crypto accounts and the companies that
they were linked to. And that was the end.
They really didn't stick that landing of like, I would never do something like
that. And even I wouldn't be putting these passwords and stuff on my
Like, come on, man. And I think what that really shows is the confidence that
they had in their laundering techniques.
They couldn't be identified in the first place.
Morgan and Lichtenstein strike a united front in a final selfie on January 31st,
2022, while the government closes in.
Scooping up the 95 ,000 bitcoins in the digital wallet, the IRS says
Lichtenstein controlled.
Today, the Justice Department announced it seized billions of dollars in stolen
cryptocurrency.
The value of the Bitcoin taken by the Justice Department has risen to $3 .6
billion, the largest seizure in its history.
U .S. authorities making an arrest in an alleged conspiracy to launder billions
of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency.
Federal agents arrest Morgan and Lichtenstein a week after seizing the
Bitcoin.
Up next on American Greed.
The Versace better win.
Razzlecon earns worldwide attention, but not quite the way she had hoped.
The Bitcoin crimes are nothing compared to calling this rap.
Always be a goat, not a gut.
A massive crypto bust.
31 -year -old Heather Morgan and her 34 -year -old husband, Ilya Lichtenstein,
were arrested in New York this morning.
Just hours after authorities arrest Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein,
Justice Department announces charges against them for their alleged roles in
conspiracy to launder stolen cryptocurrency taken during the 2016
hack. Today, the Department of Justice... has dealt a major blow to
criminals looking to exploit cryptocurrency.
The value of the 120 ,000 bitcoins has ballooned from $71 million at the time
the theft to $4 .5 billion.
This is the largest seizure of cryptocurrency ever by U .S. law
If convicted, the charges carry a prison sentence of up to 25 years.
A federal judge in Washington, D .C. releases Morgan to house arrest on $3
million bond, but orders Lichtenstein held without bail.
We called them the Bonnie and Clyde of crypto.
The headlines stunned people who knew them.
Everyone just started texting each other who knew him, like, get a load of this
kind of thing. Like, no one expected it from him. Again, it's kind of like, it's
not surprising that he would be like a relatively successful guy, but there was
no hint that he was prone to any kind of criminality.
I think he's not a bad person. I think he's probably an opportunist and a
one.
Total shock.
Total shock because it was just a wholesale transformation.
I think I understand that there was something always inside of her that was
hungry for success and attention and always kind of looking for an angle.
I would love to understand what the specific set of incentives were that
her to transform so radically.
The public can't get enough of Razzlecon.
Parsing every TikTok video, Instagram post, and YouTube rap.
I'm a bad bitch.
Go on, make me a sandwich.
The Bitcoin crimes are nothing compared to calling this rap. Bad bitch. Bad
bitch. Bad bitch. The notion that someone who kind of had such a goofy
media presence.
could be laundering $4 .5 billion worth of Bitcoin was just something that blew
people's minds.
Gotta say, I've waited for this day. I've waited for this moment where
has finally generated to my level, degenerated.
But perhaps one of the most notorious videos is the fluffy pancakes one.
These are famous pancakes.
Wow, really fluffy. People have been waiting for years to see who could have
possibly... bin the evil geniuses behind this. And then the first thing you see
is that video of her having an episode over pancakes. And the entire internet
was just like, really?
When,
you know, alleged criminals like these are busted, everybody, especially in the
cybersecurity and the hacker community, likes to point to them and say, look at
all the mistakes they made. I mean, look at these buffoons.
You know, they did try.
very sophisticated and rare techniques, this dark web thing, the use of Monero,
and yet somehow IRS criminal investigators, and I believe almost
company like Chainalysis, were able to cut through all of that and follow the
money. The government charges Morgan and Lichtenstein in a detailed criminal
complaint, but holds off on indicting them.
The evidence that's laid out by the government in the complaint shows that
Morgan and Lichtenstein were pretty deeply involved in the criminal
I would assume that the defense really want to claim that there are two babes
the woods and they just sort of happened to get caught.
The complaint accuses Morgan and Lichtenstein of laundering the stolen
but not the actual hack.
Well, there are a lot of questions here, including who did the original hack
here back in 2016, leaving open the possibility that there's more to the
There's some connection there.
You don't just wake up one day and your crypto wallet is funded with $3 .5
billion. So either he was directly involved in it or had some connection to
individual or group of individuals who were behind it.
Though defense attorneys have argued the government complaint reveals
significant holes, a judge granted a request to waive their client's right to
speedy trial.
A sign both sides may be working out a plea agreement.
Lichtenstein and Morgan may have at least one bargaining chip, or rather 7
That's the amount of bitcoins the government says they believe the couple
controls in hidden accounts linked to the hack.
They're now worth $146 million.
This is an important case for the Justice Department because it's a
setter. The message to criminals is clear.
Cryptocurrency is not a safe haven.
We can and we will follow the money no matter what form it takes.
Crypto is not going away. We know that. It's certainly going to fluctuate. It's
going to have its ups and downs.
But for so long, these spaces were seen as lawless.
This changes that.
Ilya Lichtenstein remains in federal custody in Alexandria, Virginia.
He declined an interview request, writing, I am very familiar with
greed. In fact, I'm a big fan of the show.
On advice of counsel, I cannot comment on the case while it is ongoing.
Rest assured, I will have a lot more to say once the case has been resolved.
And as for the crocodile of Wall Street, Heather Morgan is on house arrest, a
mud puddle of her own making, with strict limits on Internet usage.
And so, while much of her social media remains online for everyone to see, She
can't shape her own story.
And for Razzlecon, that may be the worst punishment of all.
You can completely create your own destiny with words and software. So
for now. Be sure to follow to see more videos.
Razzle dazzle.
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