A stroke of luck for the US government: crypto thief returns millions
Crypto coins confiscated by US authorities were suddenly gone. They are worth over 20 million dollars. The majority returned the next day.
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An unknown person has stolen cryptocurrencies worth more than 20 million US dollars from a US government wallet. He returned most of it the next day. "Only" crypto coins worth the equivalent of 1.2 million dollars are still missing.
Market observer ZachXBT drew attention to this strange event. The authorities have not commented on the matter. Coins of the cryptocurrency Ethereum and stablecoins are affected. They are a small part of the loot from the Bitfinex hack seized by US authorities in 2022.
Confiscated in 2022
In 2016, the Russian and US dual national Ilya Lichtenstein broke into the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, according to his own confession. The theft caused the price of Bitcoin to plummet. In 2017, Lichtenstein and his wife Heather "Razzlekhan" Morgan then went to great lengths to launder the loot. According to the investigating tax authorities, the couple used at least ten different cryptocurrency exchanges, various accounts under their own and fictitious names, shell companies, exchanges into various other cryptocurrencies, the purchase of gold, dollar withdrawals from crypto ATMs and even gift vouchers purchased with Bitcoin. The perpetrators also bought non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with bitcoins –, a popular method of money laundering at the time. Software helped to automate thousands of small transactions in a short space of time.
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The couple were caught in 2022 and crypto assets worth several billion dollars were confiscated. The man and his rapping wife have since been found guilty. The sentence for the two is still pending. The public prosecutor's office has proposed surprisingly short prison sentences by US standards: 5 years for Lichtenstein, one and a half years for the rapper. If the court agrees with this proposal, we can look forward to more Razzlekhan videos in the foreseeable future. A sample:
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Thief doesn't touch Donald Trump coin
A small part of the seized Bitfinex loot was placed in the cryptocurrency wallet now affected by a US authority in 2022. Another part of it was invested in stablecoins on a cryptocurrency lending platform to earn interest. At some point, a prankster donated a small amount of a Donald Trump memecoin to this wallet.
On Thursday, an unknown person first took the stablecoins from the lending platform and then emptied the wallet completely, with the exception of the Trumpcoins. On Friday, most of the crypto coins were returned. As Decrypt reports, the recovered holdings were moved to another wallet an hour later. The US authority managing the wallet is likely to have intended to keep its sheep in the dry. Only the Trumpcoins remain untouched in the wallet, which has since been emptied.
The criminal proceedings are called USA v. Ilya Lichtenstein et Heather Rhiannon Morgan and are pending in the US Federal District Court for the District of Columbia under case no. 1:22-mj-00022.
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