New York Man Pleads Guilty to Bitfinex $4.5B Hack from 2016

After seven long years, the identity of the notorious hacker who perpetrated the infamous Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange heist of Bitfinex in 2016 is out in the open. According to an CNBC report on Thursday, Ilya Lichtenstein, a New York resident, has proudly plead guilty to being the felon behind the burglary. Moreover, his wife Heather Morgan has been traced with the crime and is liable to a possible five-year time in jail.

The cryptocurrency theft consists of 119,754 Bitcoins which amounts to $76 million back when it was first reported to the public. However, the value already rose up to $4.5 billion considering Bitcoin’s current market rate. Understandably, the firm filed a certain degree of campaign to recover the taken coins and even announced a generous amount of incentives to the person who agrees to return them to side with the state working on the case. Eventually, the malicious agent traded himself, allowing himself capturing for the recognition of a major portion of the pillaged assets.

enacing up the whole story, Lichtenstein reportedly broke into the exchange system with some powerful hacking tools to amend their security levels and go proceeded on transferring over two thousand amount of digital money from Bitfinex to his wallets on different aspects. The model gone untouched had tracked routes and written off sensible scraps before US Lawfulness captured him and Morgan in February 2022, marking it as the most successful crime confiscation mission ever done by their jurisdiction. Altogether, almost 95,000 Bitcoins valued at $3.6 billion were confiscated from the defendant. Moreover, he was found are as far east us Ukraine and Kazakhstan to pay storied assets in real currency and small cash transfers went into banking accounts across the state.

With regards to the case, the court finally makes out a call of plead both criminals guilty with settlement sentence each and a massive blockade on every suspicion of assets tracing back to the crime. Indeed, the original plan of Lichtenstein and Morgan finally gets bounded and therefore their names must take care in the bolded bits of whistleblowing society history – as an upmost warning.

Robert Wilson author
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