So going back to what happened, this wallet was pinpointed to belong to 34-year-old Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, who's 31 years old. For criminals, it's the great advantage is a lot of people tout is that the transparency makes it extremely difficult to launder funds. It's been a complicated network of kind of trying to move those funds around the blockchain so that, you know, the hackers could somehow get the funds off of the blockchain and turn it into cash where they could potentially use it.īut that's the problem with the blockchain, as we've seen. They've been watching that wallet for a number of years.Īnd there's been a few things that have happened, a few developments. And actually, people who watch the blockchain, mostly these analytics companies, but anyone who wants to, has been looking at these Bitcoin wallets where the hacker essentially took the funds, seized the funds from Bitfinex, and transferred it to that wallet. Now the funds in question came from a 2016 hack of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. And he just kept underlining the point here that we've never seen sort of a governmental seizure of this size. And previously, he'd worked for the US Treasury. I was talking to someone from VRM Labs, who's- it's a blockchain analytics company.
But I think this underlines the point that this is one of the biggest seizures ever. Now, obviously, that's going to change a lot. I think one place to start is the amount of funds that have been seized by the DOJ is now amounting to something, like, $4.1 billion, according to Bitcoin's market value. You have a very colorful couple at the center of all of this, David.ĭAVID HOLLERITH: Yeah, it's unbelievable, actually. I mean, this story has everything, right? You have a big hack. And our David Hollerith has been tracking this story for us. We had the news yesterday, the Justice Department announcing that they had seized $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin related to a hack that dates back to 2016 of the Bitfinex platform. JULIE HYMAN: All right, we are going to turn to another hot story that we have been watching that I think has sort of seized on the imagination and attention of a lot of different crosscurrents, market participants, crypto market participants, and just regular people who like heist movies, I suppose- I don't know. officials seizing $3.6 billion in bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack and the arrests of TikTok rapper Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein on allegations of laundering the cryptocurrency. Yahoo Finance's David Hollerith discusses U.S.