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Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein were arrested on Tuesday in the United States where they are suspected of having tried to launder more than three billion dollars in stolen bitcoins. But it is the profile of this couple, dubbed the “Bonnie and Clyde” of cybercrime, which has mainly caught the media’s attention.
In June 2020, she wrote, between two rap songs, an article for the Forbes site to give “advice to avoid being victims” of cyberthieves on the Internet. Two years later, Morgan Heather, arrested on Tuesday February 8 in the United States, and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein are accused by the US Department of Justice of attempting to launder over $3.6 billion in stolen bitcoins.
The American authorities thus celebrated their largest seizure of bitcoins. It closes a chapter in the history of the computer heist in 2016 from Bitfinexa cryptocurrency exchange platform.
Rapper like “Genghis Khan with more pizzazz”
Cybercriminals then managed to steal 119,754 bitcoins, a loot of $71 million at the bitcoin rate at the time. Five years later, the value of this theft has exploded as the price of the famous cryptocurrency rose, reaching more than four billion dollars.
Which made Morgan Heather and Ilya Lichtenstein, accused only of money laundering and not of being behind the theft, one of the richest couples in cybercrime. At least potentially. Of the nearly 120,000 bitcoins that were stolen in 2016, the FBI only seized 94,000, or $3.6 billion, from the virtual wallets of the two lovebirds.
In addition, the couple appear to have only managed to launder a fraction of that sum – just under $1 billion – despite their efforts to cover their tracks using “a whole series of advanced techniques”, summarizes the FBI in the indictment, posted online Wednesday, February 10. “It’s proof that bitcoin is not the often portrayed haven for laundering criminal money,” said Matt Levine, a former Goldman Sachs banker turned financial columnist for the American business channel Bloomberg.
But the “exploits” of Morgan Heather and Ilya Lichtenstein have attracted all the more attention because they do not have the typical profile of cybercrime masterminds. They have nothing to do with Russian or Chinese hackers flooding the web with ransomware and other destructive viruses.
The couple was quickly nicknamed the “Bonnie and Clyde” cybercrime. A way to romanticize this case which is mainly due to the extravagant personality of Morgan Heather. This freelancer for Forbes for more than three years describes herself on Twitter as “serial entrepreneur, occasional investor, surrealist artist and stylist inspired by her synesthesia [une affection neurologique qui peut notamment permettre d’associer des sons à des couleurs]”.
A hell of a program that this thirty-year-old makes a point of specifying – or making even more abstract – on his personal website. The one who is nicknamed “Razzlekhan”, that is to say “like Genghis Khan, but with much more pizzazz (sic – a self-portrait which does not make more sense than the rest of the site)”, s’ describes it as “the Crocodile of Wall Street who attacks everyone, from Big Tech to financial giants to pharmaceutical labs”.
A rebel of the system, a sort of hactivist with an absurd artistic streak? In reality, her assault on the system and the interests of the powerful boils down to trying to break through as a rapper since 2019. With titles like “Threat to society”, “Versace Bedouin” or “High in the Cementery”, she left the critics of Rolling Stone magazine speechless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38TQeQrQ88
Not so anti-system as that
His use of the pungi – the fetish instrument of snake charmers in India -, these diatribes against the “demonic” power of Wall Street “are musically inexplicable”, résume Rolling Stone. The magazine also finds the rare clips of his songs that survive on the Internet “absurd” – his official YouTube channel having been closed after his arrest. These attempts to twerk the streets of Ho Chi Minh while explaining that she is a ‘menace to society’ “suggests that she does not have a deep understanding of the ‘flow’ of rap “, emphasizes Rolling Stone.
But above all, his anti-system and anti-“Silicon Valley model” musical releases do not fit well with his professional activities. She has not only multiplied articles for Forbes and Inc. in which she gives advice on successfully breaking into the ruthless world of start-ups.
She has, moreover, set up her own email marketing company, and has worked in several companies in Silicon Valley. It is in this other life that she would have met her future husband and alleged accomplice in the crime, Ilya Lichtenstein.
This American who also has Russian nationality has worked in at least two tech companies where Morgan Heather was employed. He has a much more classic entrepreneur profile than his wife. He notably founded MixRank, an internet marketing start-up that has received financial support from some of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley, such as billionaire Mark Cuban. Ironically, Morgan Heather makes Mark Cuban one of her targets in her “Silicon Valley Parody Rap” music video…
The cybercrime Bonnie and Clyde ended up getting married in November 2021, more than four years after they began laundering billions from the Bitfinex heist. A ceremony that friends described as “very modest”, points out the Wall Street Journal. The FBI also notes in its indictment that the money from the laundering was not used to splurge on them, since the couple used it for “gift cards” in the American supermarket Walmart, to pay Ubers or even make purchases in the online store of the Playstation video game console.
According to the Wall Street Journal, they wanted to buy a large apartment in New York soon. Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein could be spending time in a small cell instead, as they face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.