On Tuesday morning, United States authorities apprehended husband and wife pair Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan. The two are jointly charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States, for the heist of 120,000 bitcoins from cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016. Around 94,000 ($3.6 billion USD) of the Bitfinex bitcoins were recovered after authorities subpoenaed Lichtenstein and Morgan’s cloud storage account provider, and seized their private keys.
Often, when a crypto hack occurs, the perpetrator vanishes into thin air with their ill-gotten gains. Users are likely to ever see a penny of their lost funds unless a whitehat ransom agreement is reached with the criminal. The recovery of any amount, let alone such a staggering sum, is vanishingly rare.
Beating the Rap?
After the suspects’ names were revealed, Twitter users quickly set about finding out their identities, and made shocking discoveries. Ilya Lichtenstein is a flavorless entity by day, with little social media presence. Heather Morgan, on the other hand, is a blue-checked, girlbossified, rapper, fashion designer, and minor Twitter influenza. Her account reads like the LinkedIn feed of a Forbes 3,500 Under 35, full of “So true!”, loosely inspirational content, and vaxx-posting.
The kicker, the most incredible part of it all, is the videos. No power on earth will allow me to convey the experience of watching these, so please watch for yourself. They simply have to be seen to be believed.
The Perpetrator Or the Patsy?
Doubt rapidly began to swirl about the truth of the matter as soon as the details of the recovery and the identity of the alleged perpetrators was revealed. How can someone be sophisticated enough to hack an exchange for 120,000 Bitcoin, and simultaneously dumb enough to place those keys on a third party cloud server? And then to leave them there while the value of Bitcoin continued to climb, until the value of your stash exceeds the GDP of a small nation?
Did Lichtenstein and Morgan actually commit the hack? Were they simply framed by the real hacker? Were they contracted to launder the money? Were the missing Bitfinex bitcoins recovered by chance, or was there prior suspicion of these two?
Some of the answers may be revealed in the upcoming criminal investigations. Other, more esoteric theories, like the hapless duo being part of a CIA operation to cast cryptocurrency in a criminal light, are likely never to be proven, even in the improbable case that they are true.
Lichtenstein and Morgan were not reached for comment by any of the news outlets breaking the story. They are expected to make a court appearance later today.
