WASHINGTON - Tuesday its largest-ever financial seizure - more than US$3.5 billion - and the arrests of a New York couple accused of conspiring to launder billions of dollars in cryptocurrency stolen from the 2016 hack of a virtual currency exchange.
Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, a citizen of Russia and the United States, and his wife, Heather Morgan, were arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, accused of relying on various sophisticated techniques to launder the stolen money and conceal the transactions. They face federal charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States. It was unclear if they had lawyers or people who could speak on their behalf.
Investigators using what Monaco described as “old-fashioned police work” traced the stolen funds to more than a dozen accounts that officials say were controlled by Lichtenstein, Morgan and their businesses. They relied on accounts at a dark web criminal marketplace called AlphaBay, which was dismantled by the Justice Department in 2017, as a “pass-through” for the stolen bitcoin, according to documents.