A blockchain hustler and a cringey rapper have been charged with laundering $4.5B in stolen bitcoin

pcgamer.com:

US authorities have arrested two people on charges of conspiring to launder $4.5 billion—yes, billion—in cryptocurrency that was stolen during the 2016 hack of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.

Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan conspired to launder the proceeds of nearly 120,000 stolen bitcoin, according to court documents cited by the DOJ, which were transferred to a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein. Since the initial hack, roughly 25,000 bitcoin have been transferred out of that wallet and laundered through a complex series of transactions, with the resulting funds deposited into conventional accounts owned by Lichtenstein and Morgan.

The scheme went off the rails in January, though, after federal agents were able to access and decrypt a file stored in Lichtenstein's cloud storage account that provided a list of more than 2,000 virtual currency addresses and keys. Further analysis confirmed that nearly all of the addresses were directly linked to the hack; more than 94,000 bitcoin were subsequently seized. The bitcoin was valued at more than $3.6 billion at the time of seizure, making it the largest financial recoveryin DOJ history.

«Today, federal law enforcement demonstrates once again that we can follow money through the blockchain, and that we will not allow cryptocurrency to be a safe haven for money laundering or a zone of lawlessness within our financial system,» assistant attorney general Kenneth A. Polite Jr. said in a statement. «The arrests today show that we will take a firm stand against those who allegedly try to use virtual currencies for criminal purposes.»

The DOJ complaint also includes several charts illustrating how the scheme was perpetrated. The charts are simplified and