Bitfinex Hack Money Launderers Plead Guilty

July 23, 2023

The stolen Bitcoin was valued around $70 million at the time of the theft, but worth over $4 billion at the time of their arrest in February 2022. As we covered at the time, U.S. authorities were able to recover over 94,000 of the stolen Bitcoin following a joint investigation by the FBI, IRS-CI, and HSI. Tracking Bitfinex’s stolen fundsWe constructed the Chainalysis Reactor graph below based on the publicly-available DOJ indictment describing how Lichtenstein and Morgan moved the Bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex. Some funds moved to AlphaBay directly from the initial theft wallet, while others were moved there through intermediary wallets. Component 4: Mixer usage and more VCEsBy 2019, AlphaBay had been taken down by law enforcement, so Lichtenstein and Morgan needed a new money laundering method.