Agents nabbed two people in New York based on the charges they had co-operated to saturate revenue from the Bitfinex hack in 2016. Around 120,000 BTC was ransacked in the hack of 2016, worth approximately $60 million which was nearly one-sixth of the entire trading quantity at that time. At today’s price, the gross amount of bitcoin seized is estimated at $4.5 billion, but the DOJ was only able to seize about 94,000 BTC valued at $3.6 billion. Illegal transfer shifted the ransacked bitcoin to Lichtenstein’s wallet and 25,000 of the BTC were transferred out over the last five years. 94,000 BTC remained in Lichtenstein’s wallet.
According to the facts U.S. authorities tracked the looted funds on the BTC blockchain moved out of the first recipient wallet to wallets allegedly regulated by
Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan. Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account comprised 2,000 crypto wallet addresses and their private keys. Blockchain inspection substantiated that nearly all of those wallets were directly associated with the hack. Darknet market AlphaBay was reported as a protocol allegedly used by the defendants. Bitfinex assured it would work with the DOJ to get back the seized bitcoin.