A TikTok rapper and her husband have been charged with conspiring to launder $4.5bn worth of bitcoin. The bitcoin was stolen from a virtual currency exchange in 2016 in the biggest crypto-heist the world has ever seen.
Heather Morgan, 31, and Ilya’ Dutch’ Lichtenstein, 34, both of New York, New York, were arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday.
The couple is accused of conspiring to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoin swiped from Bitfinex’s platform. In 2016 a threat actor accessed the exchange’s IT systems and executed over 2,000 unauthorized transactions.
Court documents allege that the bitcoin stolen via the fraudulent transactions was sent to a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein.
“Over the last five years, approximately 25,000 of those stolen bitcoin were transferred out of Lichtenstein’s wallet via a complicated money laundering process that ended with some of the stolen funds being deposited into financial accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan,” said the US Department of Justice in a statement.
