Razzlekhan, crypto’s most embarrassing rapper, is going to prison – https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/18/24299934/razzlekhan-crypto-bitfinex-hack-heather-morgan
— The Verge (@verge-poster.bsky.social) November 18, 2024 at 5:33 PM
Remember the self-styled ‘Crocodile of Wall Street‘, and her considerably more competent Russian emigre partner? (Back in 2022, we had leisure to contemplate criminals who weren’t actually part of the government.) The Washington Post has an update on Heather “Lookit MEEE!” Morgan and her husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein:
To the internet, she’s a rapper named Razzlekhan who styled herself as the “Crocodile of Wall Street” and claimed to have more pizzazz than Genghis Khan.
But to prosecutors, she’s one half of the “bitcoin Bonnie and Clyde” duo behind a crypto heist involving buried gold coins, Ukrainian and Russian money mules, and the single-largest asset seizure in Justice Department history.
Heather Rhiannon Morgan, who moonlighted as Razzlekhan, was sentenced in federal court Monday to 18 months in prison for helping her husband launder some of the 120,000 bitcoins — now worth billions of dollars — that he admitted to stealing from global exchange Bitfinex in 2016. Her husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to launder money, a charge that carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Morgan had pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and conspiring to defraud the United States, which each carry up to five-year prison terms.
Although Lichtenstein said he was solely responsible for the theft, the case received unusual attention because of Morgan’s dichotomous online presence as a businesswoman with an email marketing company and a rapper who described her work as “horror-comedy with a splash of weird allure.” Netflix commissioned a documentary series about the duo soon after their arrest…
Morgan’s lawyer has said she developed her entertainer alter-ego to cope during a difficult time in her life. Her portrayal in the media, her attorney said in court Monday, ruined her reputation, subjected her to an “avalanche” of hateful messages and made her seem like the central player of the scheme, even though she learned about the theft after the fact and became an accomplice only to protect her husband…
The value of the stolen bitcoin increased from $71 million in 2016 to an estimated $4.5 billion when Lichtenstein and Morgan were arrested in 2022. Some of the funds were converted into gold coins that Morgan buried or laundered using thousands of small-sum transactions and accounts with fake names, among other methods, prosecutors have said.
Law enforcement seized much of the stolen bitcoin at the time of the arrest. About 96 percent of the funds have been recovered, one of Lichtenstein’s attorneys said at his sentencing…
Lichtenstein, an entrepreneur who founded multiple businesses, experimented with smaller-scale hacking and financial fraud before stealing from Bitfinex, prosecutors said.
Lichtenstein and Morgan married in 2019. Lichtenstein told her about the theft the next year and asked for help concealing the proceeds, according to court filings.
The pair embarked on a massive and meticulous scheme to liquidate the money using some of the most complicated money laundering techniques IRS agents said they’d seen to date, prosecutors said. In one example described by prosecutors, Lichtenstein used trips to Kazakhstan and Ukraine to receive debit cards and other documents tied to foreign bank accounts that were registered to money mules and sold on cybercriminal forums or in dark-net markets — e-commerce platforms that traffic in illegal goods…
At his sentencing hearing, Lichtenstein apologized for his actions, asking that any prison time given to Morgan be reassigned to him and offering his skills to help other businesses prevent cybercrime.
“My goal is to stop more crime than I have perpetrated,” Lichtenstein told Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia…
As a commentor said on my (first) post about this duo, “The writers of this timeline should be fired and escorted out to the parking lot by security.”
(A bunch of Razzlekhan videos still seem to be available on YouTube. I personally chose not to watch.)
NEW: Netflix is releasing a documentary next month about Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan called Biggest Heist Ever. It covers the story of the duo who hacked Bitfinex for 120,000 Bitcoin, now worth over $11 billion. pic.twitter.com/JrD2zt10LA
— DΛVID (@DavidShares) November 20, 2024
SpaceUnit
Gee, they seem almost nice by 2024 standards.
ETA: Okay, except for maybe the rapper shit.
rikyrah
Crooks and Grifters…. Who they are😒😒
Splitting Image
Ah, the old “I’m innocent except for helping to cover up a crime defense.”
The Audacity of Krope
And now we’re installing a government that wants to make make a new office, for efficiency’s sake🙄, and name it after cryptocurrency that itself was named as a goof because the creator new the whole thing is a scam.
Fun times.
The Audacity of Krope
If crime and shabby concealment is good enough for the President, then it should be good enough for us. Like, seriously.
hells littlest angel
Wow. Those are some slap-on-the-wrist sentences. Lucky for them they didn’t do any shoplifting.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
So how long before one of these two is named as Trump’s Treasury Secretary pick? I’m joking but, like, it’s entirely plausible.
Geminid
All right!
Derek Tran has increased his lead in California’s 45th CD race. Yesterday Tran led Republican Rep. Michelle Steel by 102 votes, but now he’s ahead by 314 votes with 96% counted. This district is in the eastern Los Angeles suburbs. It used be reliably Republican but flipped to a Democrat on 2018. Rep. Steel won it back in 2020, but it looks like Derek “Tsunami” Tran will put it back in the “D” column.
There is another close race to the north, in the Fresno-adjacent 13th CD. Freshman Republican Rep. John Duarte leads state Rep. Adam Gray by 227 votes with 96% counted. Duarte’s lead was over 2000 yesterday. Duarte carried the district by less than a thousand votes in 2022.
AP still has not called 3 other House races: Alaska, OH09 and IA01. Their current tally for the House is 218 Republicans and 212 Democrats.
TBone
Woke up to find out we are once again the victims of an Air BNB credit card scam. Again. Second time in a month. 🙄
TBone
Comment of the Morning:
TBone
Yesterday, went out to touch grass up on the Shikellamy cliffs overlooking the Susquehanna River. It is close by, and on our way to the good hoagie rolls deli in another town.
Well, the water is so low that you can see the riverbed in some dry patches. We’re in a pretty severe drought.
How are these fucks gonna cool the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island so they can run their computers when the river runs so dry?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mile-island-microsoft/
Maybe this requires a rethink. As does crypto anything.
The highlight of yesterday was watching the trains; from up there the town and the trains look like Xmas miniatures.
The Thin Black Duke
@hells littlest angel: “Their complexion is their protection.”
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: Why, in the year 2024, does it take over two weeks to count the votes in a Congressional race?
Betsy
I thought the whole feature of the bitcoin / crypto scheme was that it is totally secure and immune to theft and embezzlement.
Baud
@Betsy:
That’s more of a feature of the marketing of the scheme.
Barry
Crypto was also supposed to be free from government interference.
These dats, they want government subsidies.
JWR
@Geminid:
Excellent! I don’t really know this, but it sure seemed to me that ads for that particular race, out of many, saw the highest rotation in SoCal. He focused his ads on reproductive rights, and she on the fact that he’d represented every sort of nasty, dangerous criminal, which was sort of his job as a defense counsel. I hope he pulls it off.
NotMax
Never heard of either of them before now.
artem1s
You forgot the end of that sentence honey….to protect her husbands MONEY
RevRick
Let me get this straight. This pair stole a bunch of computer code (which is all bitcoins are, right?) from a Ponzi scheme (which are all bitcoins are, right?)
On top of that, creating these bitcoins requires vast banks of computer servers, meaning they suck up enormous amounts of electricity, which, in a world threatened by global warming, is monumentally stupid.
Have I fairly summarized this clusterf*ck?
Splitting Image
@RevRick:
Not entirely.
Because of the speculation in the bitcoin market, the bitcoins they stole went up in value faster than they could unload them, which is why they were caught with billions of dollars worth of coins when what they only stole was only worth millions.
I think that is rather funny.
Gin & Tonic
@RevRick: The best description was in a Tweet some years ago: “Imagine if leaving your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.”
RevRick
@TBone: My daughter went to Susquehanna U for environmental science.
RevRick
@Splitting Image: @Gin & Tonic: “Owning” bitcoins is a lot like hoping to find the next stupid person who will be left holding the bag. Kind of like the childhood games of “hot potato” or musical chairs… or the stock market in late September 1929.
Quinerly
VP elect provided my laugh this AM. Vance doesn’t take criticism well about not showing up to vote against Biden’s judges.
“Grace Chong is a mouth breathing imbecile who attacks those of us in the fight rather than make herself useful,” Vance insisted on X. “If I had shown up to the vote in question, the nominee would have succeeded 49-46 rather than 49-45. If every Republican had showed up, Fetterman would have come in and the Democrats still would have gotten their nominee across.”
https://ssnews.page.link/qwLynKBg7DU4aeL59
RevRick
@JWR: Not only may Democrats flip this district, but there are signs they may also flip CA13, where Duarte’s lead over Gray has shrunk from over 2,000 to just 227 the past couple of days.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’ national vote total is just 25,000 votes away from being the third most popular votes ever.
TBone
@RevRick: 💚💚💚
I listen to WQSU college radio almost exclusively. There is frequently musical commentary made, and I frequently hear stuff I never knew existed and/or is so apropos to our current events!
TBone
@Gin & Tonic: 💚💙💚
TBone
@RevRick: please continue to say this! Where did you get it from? Inquiring minds need to know! 😉
artem1s
i.e. money laundering the cash they made from the stolen goods.
the server farms for crypto and AI are why Joe was forced out by the tech lords and why the billionaire edge lords suddenly jumped to TCF bus. Just before the force out Biden announced plans to add a federal tax onto energy bills for server farms because of the strain they are putting on energy supply.
Google sued PA to re-certify 3 Mile Island nuclear plant so they could take it over and use it to generate power for their AI servers.
We are facing wild fires, droughts, and record high temperatures in multiple states and countries and all these asshats can think about is how much money they are going to make off AI for p0rn and misinformation videos for political campaigns. And they want to start up the nuclear plant that was shuttered due to the worst nuclear accident on American soil with no plans on what they will do with the waste.
It’s fucking sick.
TBone
@Splitting Image: it’s a paradox conundrum! 😆
TBone
@artem1s: Thank You for running with that story to its conclusion!
GAH!!!
I didn’t have the heart to extrapolate today.
XeckyGilchrist
TIL it’s possible to steal Bitcoin.
I mean, I figured it was subject to transfers of ownership that weren’t intended by the person who… has the key to it or whatever, but I didn’t know the law GAF about any of that. Wasn’t that the whole point?
Or is it just the cashing-out part that’s a problem?