They called themselves Dutch and Razzlekhan, but the internet chose to rename them “the Bonnie and Clyde” of the 2020s after their arrest related to a spectacular cryptocurrency theft.
• To be read also: Couple steals $3.6 billion worth of bitcoins
Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, were arrested in New York on Tuesday morning and a judge overnight ordered them held in custody until a next hearing at the weekend.
The US court suspects them of concealing and laundering bitcoins stolen from the Bitfinex virtual exchange platform in 2016. Just before arresting them, investigators recovered 94,000 bitcoins valued at $3.6 billion, a record seizure.
According to prosecutors, this stuff was on a virtual wallet controlled by Ilya Lichtenstein.
The rest of the loot was laundered through a series of complex transactions, involving computer programs, conversion to other virtual currencies and bank accounts opened under false identities, the indictment says.
More than the couple’s financial and technological prowess, social networks were getting excited on Wednesday for the video clips of rapper Heather Morgan, aka Razzlekhan.
The young woman’s YouTube channel is no longer accessible, but excerpts, widely shared, remain visible online. “I’m the fucking crocodile of Wall Street,” she sings in a high-pitched voice, parodying, to the point of absurdity, the clichés of style (lascivious dance, gold jacket…).
In a column published in 2019 by Forbes magazine – for whom she wrote for several years – she explains that she suffered from a speech problem in her youth and was mocked for her timbre of voice, but got into rap after a professional “burnout”.
“Ultra-weird”
In other online testimonials, she mentions stages of her life, the veracity of which is difficult to verify.
An article mentions a flight from Brazil after the discovery of the infidelity of a husband married very young. Others cite the creation, at the age of 23, of a company specializing in “cold” emails, a commercial prospecting technique that, according to her, enriched her.
But her Facebook account gives the image of a big teenager, with messages about her chat and her best friends, selfies of grimaces and inspired reflections like “We’re all fucking imposters, so don’t be too hard on yourself”.
In the same mix of genres, her husband Ilya Lichtenstein, a Russian-American nicknamed “Dutch”, presents himself on social networks as a “tech entrepreneur, coder and investor”, and tells of renting giant screens in Times Square to propose to her.
“I knew I had to do something memorable that shows how much I love and appreciate the real Heather, not just the dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur, but also the ultra-weird designer,” says the young man, who displays a “geeky” style.
Not very understandable to the uninitiated, his tweets talk about virtual finance or NFT (certificates of authenticity associated with virtual objects). A November post criticizes an article about cryptocurrencies that does not give advice on how to secure transactions.
In the same vein, his wife shared in 2020 with the readers of Forbes his “expert tips to protect a company from cybercriminals”.
Today, Dutch and Razzlekhan face up to 25 years in prison for their alleged cybercrime.