HEATHER Morgan and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein were charged with laundering $4.6 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2022.
But what is the story behind the alleged fraudsters?
Who is Heather Morgan?
Heather Morgan came from humble beginnings in rural California.
Morgan graduated from the University of California with a degree in economics and international relations and then went on to do a Master’s degree in economics of international development at the American University of Cairo.
Before moving to New York to pursue a career in finance, she spent time at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and gave seminars about American culture.
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Morgan describes herself on LinkedIn as a “serial entrepreneur, prolific writer, and investor in B2B software companies with high growth potential.”
While on Morgan’s website – Razzlekhan.com – she refers to herself as “the infamous Crocodile of Wall Street,” who is “more fearless and more shameless than ever before.”
Morgan was known as Razzlekhan – a New York rapper – and shared her singles on streaming platforms including YouTube and Spotify.
The first video on Morgan’s Razzlekhan YouTube channel is a song called Versace Bedouin, which she released in 2019.
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She dedicated the anthem to all the “entrepreneurs and hackers, all the misfits and smart slackers.”
But in February 2022, Morgan and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein were charged by federal prosecutors in the US for their alleged involvement in a 2016 plot to launder roughly $4.5 billion in cryptocurrencies stolen from Hong Kong-based crypto exchange Bitfinex.
Almost 120,000 Bitcoins were illegally taken from users’ accounts in 2016.
Although they weren’t charged with pulling off the hack, the couple was accused of laundering a portion of that total, worth $71 million at the time and valued at more than S4.5 billion at the time of their arrest.
The August 2016 Bitfinex hack was one of the largest crypto heists on record – causing the price of Bitcoin at the time to plummet by 20 per cent.
In August 2022, Morgan broke her silence on Twitter and said: “I am not involved in any crypto project.
“Any crypto or NFT project bearing my name or likeness is a scam that I do not endorse.”
Who is Ilya Lichtenstein?
Ilya Lichtenstein, who goes by Dutch, studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin and started his career in IT.
In 2005 he joined Northwestern University as a technical support but left after just one year to start a role in marketing at Avanoo.
In late 2007, he founded his own marketing company called Nexus Global.
After that, he co-founded a customer discovery platform called MixRank.
Prior to his arrest, Lichtenstein had been working on “the first decentralised cloud wallet.”
Lichtenstein said in 2019: “As you may know, Heather is not just a tech entrepreneur, she is also Razzlekhan, the fearless rapper. And what better way to propose to an entrepreneur/rapper than with a weird, creative multi-channel marketing campaign?”
Lichtenstein and Morgan got engaged in June 2019.
He announced their engagement in a Facebook post, calling Morgan his “best friend and the woman of my dreams”.
The pair got married in November 2021, in a wedding that Morgan described on Instagram as “surrealist.”
Morgan captioned a short clip from the wedding on the social media platform: “I had the good marriage ceremony ever. Thank you to everybody who got here, streamed, and carried me on a Moroccan Palanquin.”
What is Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein’s net worth?
Heather Morgan is rumoured to be worth around $2 million while Ilya Lichtenstein is believed to be worth around $5 million.
The pair were living at 75 Wall Street when the were arrested, an exclusive block where a typical apartment costs upwards of $1 million.
