#PaymentsCompliance Notebook

Bitfinex Hacker And Wife Plead Guilty To Launder Billions In Crypto

Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan?have pleaded?guilty to money laundering arising from the hack and theft of approximately 120,000 Bitcoin from global crypto exchange Bitfinex.

The New York couple was arrested in February 2022 after US officials seized 95,000 of stolen #Bitcoins in the value of $3.6bn.?

It was the largest ever Bitcoin asset seized by US authorities, as?reported?by VIXIO. Since then, the government has seized another $475m tied to the hack.

Lichtenstein pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

In addition to the money laundering charges, Lichtenstein also admitted carrying out the hack on Bitfinex. This is the first time it has been publicly revealed that Lichtenstein was the hacker.

The guilty pleas in this case “mark a dramatic milestone in an investigation that spanned seven years and involved billions of dollars in assets”, said Ari Redbord , global head of policy and government affairs at TRM Labs .

At the time of the breach, the nearly 120,000 Bitcoins were valued at approximately $71m. By the time of seizure, the stolen funds were valued at over $4.5bn due to the increase in the value of the crypto asset, Redbord pointed out.

Card Payments Affected By Outage In #Netherlands

A nationwide?outage?caused problems for debit card payments in stores in the Netherlands on Thursday, with many payments failing to process.?

Local press coverage also suggested that there were problems with withdrawals from Geldmaat ATMs.

The failure was relatively short lived, having first been reported at 11:30am on Thursday and resolved later that afternoon.?

The Betaalvereniging Nederland (Dutch Payments Association) said the PIN malfunction was the result of a temporary problem on the internal network at a Netherlands' transaction processor.