A couple was arrested in New York for having stolen and laundered an amount of cryptocurrency today valued at 4.5 billion dollars, one of the largest ever recorded, the Justice Department reported.
The authorities have managed to seize 3,600 million to date, because, despite the fact that the detainees they had created “a labyrinth of transactions” of cryptocurrencies, specialized agents have “shown that they can and will follow the money trail, whatever form it takes”.
The couple, a young married couple Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31took advantage in 2016 of the hacking of the Bitfinex platform, one of the main cryptocurrency exchange platforms, and appropriated 119,754 coins with which he made 2,000 transactions that led to multiply its value from the 71 million that were worth then to the 4,500 million today.
man had created a complex money laundering system that included the creation of false identities to open bank accounts, computer programs to automate transactions (so that many can be done in a short period of time) or deposit the stolen funds in a variety of cryptocurrencies for a short time, all in order to make it difficult to trace those funds.
The activity of the couple lasted five yearsuntil a judge allowed federal agents to access one of the couple’s online accounts, where they detected a series of files containing the private keys with which they accessed their digital wallet and their different accounts.
It was that operation that allowed to recover the 3,600 million dollars and follow in the footsteps of the couple, who risks a sentence of up to twenty years for money laundering.
The arrest and seizure of the money “show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco was quoted as saying in the department statement.
In the course of the five years after the theft, 25,000 of those bitcoins had left the portfolio through a “cryptocurrency transaction maze” and were used especially to buy gold and NFT (“non-fungible tokens”, in English), that is. 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. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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