The court in Washington has sentenced one of the defendants in a high-profile case involving the theft of cryptocurrency from the Bitfinex exchange to five years in prison. 35-year-old Ilya Lichtenstein was found guilty of laundering bitcoins stolen in 2016. Upon completion of his prison term, the convict will be required to spend three years under supervision.
Heather Morgan, the second person involved in the case and Lichtenstein’s wife, is awaiting sentencing on November 18. Both defendants had pleaded guilty last year to charges of laundering stolen cryptocurrency.
According to the prosecutor’s office in the Colombia district, Lichtenstein had hacked into the Bitfinex network in 2016 and made over 2,000 unauthorized transactions, transferring bitcoins to a personal wallet. Subsequently, he deleted accounting data and log files from the exchange system in an attempt to cover his tracks.
Morgan joined the criminal scheme at a later stage when her husband enlisted her help in laundering the stolen funds. The couple created fake identities to set up online accounts, used automated programs for transactions, placed the stolen funds on darknet and cryptocurrency sites, and converted bitcoins into other cryptocurrencies and gold coins. They also utilized mixing services to obfuscate the origin of the funds and involved accounts belonging to American companies to legitimize their banking operations.
The total amount of stolen cryptocurrency was 119,754 bitcoins, valued at $72 million at the time of the theft, which has now increased to over $10 billion. Law enforcement authorities managed to seize the majority of the funds, specifically 94,643 bitcoins, with plans to return them to Bitfinex exchange. The crypto community is closely monitoring the timeline for the return of the seized funds to the exchange.
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