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the New York A couple accused of attempting to launder $4.50 one billion in bitcoin Bitfinex stolen in the 2016 hack appears ready to plead guilty in the case.
The couple, Elijah Lichtenstein and Heather Rhiannon Morgan, are newly charged in the case with a document known as a tip, according to a new entry in the federal court docket in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
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Information is a type of charge document that federal prosecutors typically use when defendants agree to plead guilty.
Another entry in the docket shows that Lichtenstein and aspiring rapper Morgan have been ordered to appear in court on August 3 for separate charges and information hearings.
The nature of the charge or the fee contained in the information was not made public. It is common for the information to contain fewer charges than those originally brought against the defendants, or to have different charges.
Reserve photos for Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein.
Courtesy of: Alexandria Adult Detention Center.
The schedule showed that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kutley ordered prosecutors and defense attorneys on Friday to provide her petition papers by Thursday.
These papers should include “suspected offense(s) and legal verdicts; charge(s) in payment and legal verdicts; items of offense; copy of plea agreement and penalties; and guideline accounts (federal verdicts).”
The pair were originally charged in a criminal complaint when they were arrested in February 2022, and have pleaded not guilty to the charges listed in that document — conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Morgan, known as “Razzlekhan,” is free on a $3 million bond. Nicknamed “Dutch”, Liechtenstein has been held in prison since February 2022 without bail after a judge ruled the Russian immigrant was a flight risk.
The US Attorney’s Office in Washington, which is trying the couple, declined to comment. Their defense attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNBC.
Prosecutors said weeks after the couple’s arrest that they were in negotiations.
The couple’s case has repeatedly continued since their arrest. Until Friday’s new agenda restrictions, they were scheduled to appear at a hearing on Monday. The hearing was adjourned due to the submission of the new charging document.
Lichtenstein, 34, and Morgan, 32, are accused of attempting to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoins that were stolen from the Bitfinex exchange in August 2016. The couple has not been charged in the hack of the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange.
At the time of their arrests, the Justice Department said officials had managed to seize more than 94,000 bitcoins involved in the hack, which at the time of the forfeiture was worth about $3.6 billion. It was the largest financial forfeiture in the history of the Department of Justice.
The bitcoin stolen in the hack was only worth $70 million at the time of the theft, but has skyrocketed in value in the following years.
“Over the past five years, approximately 25,000 stolen bitcoins were moved from Liechtenstein’s wallet through a complex money laundering operation that ended with some of the stolen funds being deposited into financial accounts controlled by Liechtenstein and Morgan,” the Justice Department said at the time of their arrests.
Netflix announced in early 2022 that it had commissioned a series based on the couple.
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