2016 Bitfinex Hack: Couple Charged over $4.5B in Stolen BTC Strikes Plea Deal

American rapper, Heather ‘Razzlekhan’ Morgan, and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, have entered into a plea agreement with US prosecutors, according to a court document seen by Reuters. The couple was first arrested in February 2022 for allegedly laundering cryptocurrency worth $4.5 billion stolen via a hack of the digital asset platform, Bitfinex, in 2016.

US Couple Enters Plea Agreement

According to Reuters, the pair will appear before Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelley in Washington on August 3, 2023, for a plea hearing. In its action last year, the Department of Justice (DoJ) charged the couple with conspiracy to commit money laundering and defraud the United States.

In August 2016, hackers stole over 119,000 bitcoins from Bitfinex via thousands of unauthorized transactions. The stolen BTCs, which were priced at $71 million at the time, are worth about $3.5 billion at today’s BTC spot market price.

Last year, the DoJ, after Morgan and Lichtenstein were arrested, the DoJ announced that it had seized about $3.6 billion in stolen digital assets directly linked to the hack. However, prosecutors are now seeking that the couple forfeit billions of dollars in assets.

Bitfinex Continues Recovery Efforts

Meanwhile, Finance Magnates reported that Bitfinex has continued to maintain its efforts to return some of the stolen cryptocurrencies. Last month, the exchange received $315,000 in cash and cryptocurrencies from the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The cryptocurrencies were seized by the US Customers and Border Protection, an enforcement agency of the DHS.

Previously, Bitfinex recovered small amounts of the stolen bitcoins. In 2021, the exchange retrieved 6.5 BTC worth $305,000 at the time through its partnership with another crypto trading platform, Poloniex. Similarly, Bitfinex in February 2019 reclaimed 28 BTC worth over $107,000 from the US government.

Meanwhile, a recent report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global network of investigative journalists, claimed that Bitfinex never made public a confidential report that found its security lapses responsible for the 2016 hack. Reacting, Bitfinex dismissed the claims, calling them “factually incorrect.”