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The US Department of Justice lashed out at some New Yorkers who carried out the largest cryptocurrency theft in its history after benefiting from the hacking of the security system of a digital exchange house, which made 2,000 unauthorized operations in accounts of different users. The criminals, who will remain under house arrest until trial, had spent money on items such as gold and non-fungible tokens on the ‘Dark web’.
The US authorities made progress on a criminal couple accused and investigated for steal and launder $3.6 billion in bitcoina record figure for the country’s Justice.
The suspects had obtained this amount of money in operations linked to multiple hacks that occurred in 2016.
The New York couple made up of Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan, aged 34 and 31 respectively, were arrested in Manhattan in the morning. They are charged with conspiring to launder more than 119,000 stolen bitcoins after a hacker breached the cyber security of digital exchange Bitfinex and made more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions.
Justice Department officials said the price was around $71 million at the time, but after the currency’s rise it is now over $4.5 billion.
The loot was spent on various items, from gold and non-expendable tokens to $500 Walmart gift cards.
This financial seizure, the largest ever by the Department of Justice, was prompted by a tip generated by the 2017 bankruptcy of an underground digital market, which was used to launder a portion of the funds and transferred to ‘AlphaBay’, a version of the ‘Ebay’ service hosted on the dark web.
“Cryptocurrencies are not a safe haven for criminals”
After the site was taken down, authorities accessed the internal transaction log, where a cryptocurrency account in Lichtenstein’s name was left connected.
Deputy District Attorney Lisa Monaco stressed in a statement that “cryptocurrencies are not a safe haven for criminals.”
Now, in the case filed in federal court in Washington, Lichtenstein and Morgan will face charges of committing money laundering.
At the initial appearance in federal court in Manhattan, Judge Debra Freeman set bail at $5 million for Lichtenstein and $3 million for Morgan and demanded her parents’ house as collateral to return to court.
Both will go to house arrest with electronic monitoring despite the request of prosecutors to detain both, arguing that there was a flight risk. However, he prevailed over the request of defense attorney Anirudh Bansal, justifying that they both knew they had been under investigation since November and, even so, they did not leave the United States.
The criminal case on Tuesday, February 8, comes four months after prosecutor Monaco announced that the Department would open a new National Cryptocurrency Compliance Team made up of a combination of cybersecurity and anti-money laundering experts.
with EFE