US authorities arrested Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, in 2022 for laundering Bitcoin connected to the Bitfinex exchange.
Ilya Lichtenstein, the hacker who stole billions worth of Bitcoin from the crypto exchange Bitfinex in 2016, was sentenced to five years in prison.
Washington, DC, District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Lichtenstein in a Nov. 14 hearing after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in August 2023. In addition to jail time, Lichtenstein was ordered to serve three years of supervised release.
Lichtenstein was facing up to 20 years in jail, but prosecutors had recommended he serve five years as he had no prior criminal history, gave “substantial assistance” in other investigations and managed to launder only 25,111 Bitcoin (BTC) out of the 119,754 BTC he stole from Bitfinex, currently worth over $10.4 billion with the cryptocurrency priced around $87,500.
