An In-Depth Look at the Couple Accused of Laundering 94,636 Bitcoin From the 2016 Bitfinex Hack – Featured Bitcoin News - BitcoinEthereumNews.com
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) arrested two individuals that are accused of an “alleged conspiracy to launder” 94,636 bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex in 2016. Interestingly, both of the suspects are known individuals within the tech industry as Ilya Lichtenstein was the co-founder of Mixrank, a Y-Combinator backed startup and Heather Morgan was a writer for Forbes. The Myriad of Mysterious Bitcoin Transfers From the 2016 Bitfinex Hack The U.S. government anounced the “largest cryptocurrency seizure to date” after the DOJ seized 94,636 bitcoins that were stolen in the August 2016 Bitfinex hack. On August 2, 2016, a hacker managed to breach Bitfinex and steal 120,000 bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoins price shuddered 24 hours after the breach losing 22% in USD value during the course of the aftermath. At first, Bitfinex talked about reimbursing customers with a bail-in haircut plan, which means traders would only get a fraction of losses. Two weeks later after the 120,000 BTC was stolen, Bitfinex gave the crypto community an investigation update. Instead of following through with the haircut plan, Bitfinex introduced “recovery rights tokens,” in order to make amends with the customers who lost funds. The coins were called BFX tokens and by April 3, 2017,