What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial on this channel, we cover everything related to stocks and investing. It is sometimes said that the truth is stranger than fiction, and this is especially true in the world of cryptocurrencies. Recently, a new york-based married couple by the names of ilya, lichtenstein and heather morgan were charged with attempting to launder four and a half billion dollars worth of stolen bitcoin. While such a large crypto related crime would drive headlines on its own.

What really made this story? Interesting was the eccentric nature of one of the perpetrators heather morgan when she wasn't laundering bitcoins, she pursued a career as a rapper under the stage name razzle khan, and calls herself the crocodile of wall street. In 2019 she released a hilariously, bad music. Video called versace bedouin, which showed her stomping around in front of the new york stock exchange. But how could someone who appears so comically unsophisticated mastermind the largest bitcoin related crime in u.s history? In this video, we'll look at how illia, liechtenstein and heather morgan were able to illegally obtain four and a half billion dollars worth of bitcoin and how they were finally caught.

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Make sure to check out kamikodo.com wsm link in the description below and now back to the video. The case started all the way back in 2016, when a hong kong-based cryptocurrency exchange called bitfinex was hacked. The anonymous hackers gained access to 2 000 accounts and transferred 120 000 bitcoins into a single account which they controlled at the time. It was worth about 70 million dollars and 36 percent of the total value of cryptocurrencies held by bitfinex customers.

Most people thought bitfinex was doomed, as there is no way they can make back this 70 million loss, but surprisingly, they found a way to make their customers whole and are still operating. Today after the hack occurred, they issued new bfx tokens for every dollar. Each customer lost these tokens could be redeemable for either one dollar or an equivalent amount of bitfinex equity at a future date. Within eight months they were able to generate 70 million dollars worth of revenue from crypto transactions on their platform and redeem all the bfx tokens effectively making their customers whole for their losses.

Not all customers were happy, though. In the beginning, most traders were skeptical that bitfinex could ever make back these losses, so the bfx coins trade as low as 15 cents on the dollar victims who sold at the lows lost 80 of their value, while those who bought the coins made a windfall when The company were able to make good on their commitment against all odds, but regardless it's impressive that the exchange was somehow able to come back from such a catastrophic loss. The 120 000 of stolen bitcoins stayed within a wallet. The transactions were recorded on the public blockchain.

So everyone could see where they were and they could see if they were ever transferred away to different wallets. One of the main allures of bitcoin is that transactions are anonymous. Everyone can see the stolen coins in this wallet, but there is no way of telling who controls the wallet and thus no way to recover them. On the surface, this looks like the perfect crime, but there's a problem.

If the hackers wanted to spend their newly acquired wealth, they needed a way to convert the bitcoin to cash. To do this, they would have to transfer the coins to a regulated exchange which is connected to the highly regulated u.s banking system. These regulated exchanges all have to follow, strict know your customer or kyc regulations. That means that you have to verify your identity, which would make it extremely easy for law enforcement to trace the stolen bitcoin to your real name and address the hackers now had a stash of 120 000 bitcoins, but the second they tried to spend any of it.

They would be immediately exposed to add insult to injury. The price of bitcoin started skyrocketing over the next few years. By 2021, their 70 million dollar stolen fortune grew to more than 4 billion. You can imagine how frustrating it would be to technically be a billionaire, but not be able to spend a penny of your fortune.

The 120 000 bitcoins eventually ended up in the hands of the new york-based couple, ilya lichtenstein and heather morgan. While we don't know for sure, if they were behind the 2016 hack, it's very likely that they were involved. Otherwise, how would they again control the coins? Lichtenstein has a long and accomplished career as a tech investor and entrepreneur having co-founded a successful marketing software company. His wife, heather morgan has a perhaps even more impressive resume.

Not only is she a software entrepreneur, she is also a surrealist artist and rapper she's, ceo of a company called salesfolk, which helps businesses cold email, prospective customers. In addition to all of that, she was a prolific forbes contributor, having written dozens of articles for them between 2016 and 2021. Despite what morgan's music video might lead you to believe, it appears that this couple are highly sophisticated technologists and were possibly capable of pulling off the 2016 bitfinex hack. In fact, if one of her songs cut throughout country, she has the following lyrics: spearfish your password.

All your funds transferred - this is possibly a reference to the 2016 bitfinex hack, but anyway they had four and a half billion dollars in a crypto wallet. They needed a way to launder these funds into cash without drawing attention from the authorities. Instead of transferring all the funds at once, they initiated thousands of small transactions and numerous fake accounts at various exchanges which they opened with fabricated identities. They also convert the bitcoin to other cryptos, which are harder to trace.

Specifically, they use the monero coin, which has become popular amongst cyber criminals, as it is almost impossible for the public to view transaction histories. After a convoluted web of thousands of transactions, the funds were ultimately deposited to and withdrawn from accounts owned by morgan and lichtenstein in the past. They also ran the bitcoin through various services on the now defunct alpha bay dark web platform, which allowed them to further obfuscate. The trail of transactions, the coins were then deposited at multiple regulated, crypto exchanges under accounts with fake names and email addresses.

Much of these funds were frozen after the owners failed to prove their identities, but regardless of how complicated the web of transactions were, they needed to eventually end up in verified accounts owned by the perpetrators. If they were ever to withdraw the funds as cash, the coins ended up being accounts on regulated exchanges owned by liechtenstein and morgan. They withdrew cash and used it to buy things like walmart gift cards, other cryptos and nfts. After months of painstaking work, the fbi was able to eventually trace all their transactions and figure out the identities of this crypto bonnie and clyde.

They were both arrested in february 2022 and each face up to 25 years in federal prison. The government raided the couple's new york home and seized control of 94 000 bitcoins worth 3.6 billion dollars. So what will happen to this giant cash pile? The money was originally stolen from bitfinex users, so you might think that they should be returned to their original owners. However, bitfenix already reimbursed all their customers for the 70 million dollars that the coins were worth at the time since bitfinex already made good on this debt, the 94 000 recovered bitcoins will probably be given to the bitfinex company.

They spent 70 million dollars to reimburse their customers back in 2016 and they'll probably be getting 3.6 billion dollars worth of bitcoins returned to them. That's a 51 times return on investment. The case of liechtenstein and morgan sheds a light on how cryptocurrencies will be used in the financial system going forward. One of the main criticisms of crypto is that it is only useful for dark web transactions and various cyber crimes.

Many bitcoin bulls have pointed out that law enforcement would actually love it if fermental started using bitcoin, which is far easier to track than paper currencies, and these most recent arrests seem to prove this point. But it begs the question: if bitcoin is not used by criminals, what is its use, despite some early adopters, very few people use bitcoin to pay for day-to-day transactions because of its volatility and high transaction fees. One potential use case for bitcoin is legal, but controversial activities. Many porn stars have trouble using the traditional banking system, as banks often freeze their accounts because their transactions look suspicious.

This often happens, even if they're not doing anything. Illegal bitcoin has come to dominate transactions in the legal sex industry as it allows them to transact and they have no need to hide their identities with. That being said, it's unclear if these types of transactions will be enough to support bitcoin's current 800 billion dollar market cap, all right guys that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about razzlecon and her four and a half billion dollar crypto heist? Is this development good or bad for the future of bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below, as always.

Thank you so much for watching and we'll see in the next one wall, street millennial signing out.