The court postponed the hearing on the case of bitcoin laundering with Bitfinex

The US court postponed to August the consideration of the case of a married couple involved in the disappearance of 94,000 bitcoins from the Bitfinex exchange.

The decision in the case of Heather Morgan and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein, accused of attempting to launder cryptocurrencies stolen from the Bitfinex trading platform in 2016, has been postponed. The young family, infamously known as the “crocodiles of Wall Street,” was scheduled to appear in federal court in Washington on June 3.

But at the May 30 court hearing, federal prosecutors insisted on postponing the hearing to Aug. 2. The prosecution cites a “pre-trial discussion of a possible resolution” and the need for defendants to review the government’s “voluminous financial statements” and plead guilty.

Recall that the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex was hacked in August 2016. Hackers were able to steal about 120,000 bitcoins from the site. A few years later, in February 2022, it was reported that burglars continue to cover up the traces of the crime. It was discovered that another batch of bitcoins worth about $ 3.6 billion was transferred to an unknown address.
A little later, the American police arrested a married couple from New York for laundering bitcoins stolen during the hacking of the Bitfinex exchange in 2016. More than 94,000 BTC worth $ 3.6 billion were seized from the couple, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco (Lisa Monaco) called this seizure “the largest financial confiscation in history.” The Justice Department did not charge the couple with hacking, but only of laundering proceeds and initiating more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions. The federal executive department said the stolen cryptocurrency was worth just $72 million, but at the time of the arrest, the value of the assets had risen to $4.5 billion.

In a statement, Bitfinex confirmed cooperation with the Ministry of Justice in the investigation, as “I am glad that the authorities managed to return a significant part of the bitcoins stolen during the hack in 2016.”