US seizes $3.6 billion in stolen bitcoin

U.S announced to have recovered more than 94,000 bitcoins stolen in 2016 from the virtual exchange platform Bitfinex and that are valued today at US $ 3,600 million, a record figure for a judicial seizure.

A couple suspected of seeking to launder stolen bitcoins in a “transaction labyrinth of cryptocurrencies” was arrested Tuesday morning in New York, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, will appear before a federal judge.

“These arrests and this judicial seizure, the largest ever made by the (Justice) department shows that cryptocurrencies are not a haven for criminals,” Deputy Justice Minister Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

In August 2016, a hacker had broken into the systems of the Bitfinex platform and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions, stealing nearly 120,000 bitcoins, then valued at $65 million.

According to prosecutors, the virtual currency ended up in a digital portfolio held by Ilya Lichtenstein, who presents himself on social media as a “tech entrepreneur, coder and investor.”

Within five years of the theft, 25,000 of those bitcoins had exited the portfolio through a “cryptocurrency transaction maze” and were used primarily to buy gold and silver. NFT (“non fungible tokens”, in English), that is, certificates of authenticity associated with virtual objects.

The rest of the bitcoins, now valued at $3.6 billion, taking into account rising bitcoin prices, were recovered by investigators last week, to be returned to victims of the theft.

The investigation continues, authorities said, without giving details about the initial author of the computer attack.