Hip-hop, tiktok and cryptobanda

The history of the Russian-American married couple, which was able to crank up one of the largest fraudulent schemes with crypto-shoes in US history

On Tuesday, Manhattan was detained a married couple on suspicion of laundering about 120 thousand bitcoins stolen when breaking the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange in 2016. Law enforcement officers managed to confiscate from the Russian Ilya Liechtenstein and the American Heather Morgan most of them - 94.6 thousand bitcoins (about $ 3.6 billion at the time of seizure, now about $ 4 billion). The US Ministry of Justice said that this is the largest confiscation of cryptocurrency assets in history.

The spouses were charged with conspiracy to cash cryptocurrency, which they face up to 20 years in prison, and in conspiracy to deceive the United States - for this, up to five years in prison. About whether Liechtenstein and Morgan are connected directly with the attack on Bitfinex are not specified in the department. On February 8, the couple appeared before the US Federal Court, located on Manhattan.

The New York Times reported that the court released Liechtenstein on bail in the amount of five million dollars, and Morgan on security of three million dollars. However, later the pledge was suspended , a couple was placed under arrest. According to the Ministry of Justice, the spouses with the help of a complex scheme in five years managed to “wash” the less than one fifth part of the stolen - about 25 thousand bitcoins, which is equivalent to $ 1.1 billion or 82.3 billion rubles.

During this time, the married couple gained fame in social networks thanks to their own rap clips on YouTube under the pseudonym Razzlekhan, articles for business magazines Inc. And Forbes about financial security, as well as tiktoks on how to build a multi -billion dollar business. So, with his personal anthem, 31-year-old Morgan, who declared himself a “crocodile with Wall Street,” calls the track Versace Bedouin .

“This song is for entrepreneurs and hackers, losers and loafers,” the clip begins. In one of the verses, the woman reads that she is simultaneously “a rapper, economist, writer, journalist and CEO, as well as dirty-gryaznaya-gryaznaya whore” ( literal translation -ed. ).

Indeed, the Hizer Morgan profile in LinkedIn says that it founded Salesfolk, which helped more than 920 companies B2B optimize their activities through e -mail. She indicated in the description of her account that at the moment

It is engaged in the development of corporate software for "combating the growth of fraud and cybercrime."

On the Forbes website, under the authorship of Morgan, more than 50 notes are published on the topics of sales, business, bigtech and art. In the journal Inc. She mainly wrote about marketing and sales. In one article, for 2020, a woman told how to protect her business from cybercriminals and scammers who "enjoy malfunctions caused by pandemia."

The woman also leads several Tiktok accounts: in one she talks about how she created a “multi-billion dollar business” while twenty years old, and disassembles the mistakes of commercial companies when sending electronic letters to customers, and in another reads rap.

The husband Morgan, Russian Ilya Liechtenstein, occasionally appears in Razzlekhan RAP clips. According to The New York Times, a man, nicknamed "Dutchman", who also has American citizenship, calls himself a technological entrepreneur, a programmer and an investor. Contractedly Lichtenstein’s profile in LinkedIn, he founded a blockchain startup called Endpass, “solving the problems of decentralized identification and authentication” of the network users.

Investigators in the case of a married couple on money laundering managed to trace the movement of Bitfinex bitcoins stolen from the Bitfinex exchange in the blockchain - a digital “Book”, which is updated every time Bitcoin moves to a new cryptocurrency wallet. Law enforcement officers were able to confiscate more than 94 thousand bitcoins by receiving passwords to the account from the cloud storage of Liechtenstein. They argue that some of these funds ultimately found themselves in the financial accounts of Liechtenstein and Morgan, who spent them on non -replaced tokens (NFT) and gold.

Also, according to the prosecutor’s office, to legalize the stolen billions, the spouses opened many bills for fictional names, made thousands of transactions to minor amounts of money and distributed money on cryptocurrency exchanges. In addition, Liechtenstein and Morgan bought a gift certificates of the Walmart hypermarket for cryptocurrency, from which they paid for trips to Uber and rental housing on Hotels.com, as well as for the purchase of PlayStation.

Despite the efforts made, the couple’s activities repeatedly attracted the attention of cryptocurrency exchanges - so when their assets were frozen in the amount of more than 186,000 dollars, the couple used fictional names to open seven more accounts on the same exchange.

The New York Times drew attention to the fact that in 2014 on her twitter, Morgan called Bitcoin a "fragile asset that has no real value and will sooner or later reach zero." Six years later, the woman again spoke about Bitcoin on Twitter, saying that "this bubble could burst soon."