The Rise and Fall of the Bitcoin Bandits

Though Heather and Ilya are eccentric, no one could have imagined they’d be involved in one of the largest financial scams in America

- By Richard Van Rensburg

During the peak of the Covid pandemic, Heather Morgan occupied herself by learning Russian; designing streetwear fashion; and rapping about Wall Street’s excesses as her alter ego, Razzlekhan. Sheeven wrote articles for Forbes magazine in which she expressed her deep concern about cybercrime.

“Cybercriminals and fraudsters are taking advantage of this unexpected disruption, she wrote in a June 2020 column. She goes on to caution that people aren’t always who they seem to be online.

As it turns out, she was warning readers against people like herself: having recently been arrested and charged with laundering an eye-watering amount of cryptocurrency, the American and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, are now known as Bitcoin Bonnie and Crypto Clyde.

The staggering amounts involved have set the world of cryptocurrency abuzz: before their arrests last month, the couple managed to launder bitcoin worth $4,5 billion (about R67,5bn).

A raid of their New York apartment yielded the evidence that would result in the eventual confiscation of $3,6bn (R54bn) in crypto – the largest seizure made by the US department of justice.

Since 2016, investigators had been trying to hunt down the money that was stolen in the hacking of Bitfinex, a British Virgin Islands cryptocurrency exchange.