Prosecutors have faith requested that Heather Morgan – better known by her rap moniker “Razzlekhan” – be sentenced to staunch 18 months leisurely bars for her role in laundering 120,000 bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex in a 2016 hack.
In August 2023, Morgan pleaded guilty to one depend of cash laundering conspiracy and one depend of conspiracy to defraud the United States, every of which carries a most sentence of 5 years in detention center.
Even supposing Morgan and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein were first believed to entirely have faith laundered the proceeds of the hack (value roughly $7.5 billion at on the present time’s ticket), Lichtenstein later admitted to being the long-established hacker and pleaded guilty to one depend of conspiracy to commit cash laundering, which carries a most sentence of Twenty years in detention center.
In line with court documents, Lichtenstein utilized the hack alone in 2016, and did no longer reveal his wife or enlist her assist with laundering the cash except four years later, in 2020, making her entirely an adjunct to the crime after it had already came about.
“She became in some ideas thrust into the center of a predominant prison diagram without her preliminary consent, and positively felt compelled to enhance it out of a sense of loyalty to her husband and desire to retain their life collectively,” prosecutors wrote within the memo. “That does exclaim the seriousness of her habits, as she did within the slay join her husband’s conspiracy and use her have faith skillset to assist and pork up his prison endeavors.”
Prosecutors have faith urged a lenient sentence for Morgan in light of her early acceptance of responsibility and it looks “ample assistance to legislation enforcement,” as effectively because the truth that she herself spent very tiny of the prison proceeds.
Then but again, they additionally entreated the deem to have faith in thoughts that, at several substances all the design in which thru the investigation, Morgan attempted to obstruct justice by destroying proof – throwing a computer down a rubbish chute, deleting files from gadgets, and, all the design in which thru legislation enforcement’s execution of a search warrant at her and Lichtenstein’s Fresh york apartment, pretended to be grabbing her cat from below the bed whereas secretly shutting off her phone.
As effectively as to soliciting for penitentiary time for Morgan, prosecutors have faith asked the court to exclaim her to “return the cryptocurrencies seized by the authorities without lengthen from the Bitfinex Hack Pockets – along with roughly 94,643.29837084 BTC, 117,376.52651940 Bitcoin Cash (BCH), 117,376.58178024 Bitcoin Satoshi Imaginative and prescient (BSV), and 118,102.03258447 in Bitcoin Gold (BTG) valued at extra than $6 billion right now prices – as in-form restitution to Bitfinex.”
Morgan is determined to be sentenced on Nov. 15 at 2:00 PM in Washington, D.C., one day after Lichtenstein is sentenced.
