Heather Morgan, a 31-year-old New Yorker, has a lot going for her: “a serial entrepreneur, a prolific writer, a sassy comedy rapper, and an investor in high-growth B2B software companies.”
But her LinkedIn bio makes no mention of her alleged ability to help launder hacked cryptocurrencies.
FBI agents arrested Morgan yesterday morning – or was it her rapper alter ego Razzlehan? — and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, on charges of conspiracy to launder cryptocurrencies linked to the 2016 Bitfinex hack that resulted in the theft of 119,756 Bitcoins (BTC) from a cryptocurrency exchange.
The couple vigorously pleaded not guilty during a speech in a New York court on Tuesday and were released under multi-million dollar bonds.
This is all a psychological operation to make us look stupid for being hacked by the most inept criminals on earth — nic carter ᵍᵐ (@nic__carter) February 8, 2022
The 119,756 BTC stolen from Bitfinex was worth $72 million in August 2016 but is now valued at over $5.1 billion. After the 2016 hack, individuals associated with the stolen coins periodically transferred small amounts of BTC in separate transactions, leaving most of the funds intact.
The Justice Department said it tracked 25,000 BTC of these transferred funds to financial accounts controlled by Liechtenstein and Morgan. Special agents were then able to access and confiscate more than 94,000 BTC — worth $3.6 billion at the time — from Morgan and Liechtenstein after a search warrant allowed them to view files containing private keys to the wallet.
The couple are charged with money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud the United States, according to a Justice Department complaint, but they have not been charged with carrying out the hack itself. On the first charge, you can get up to 20 years in prison, on the second – up to 5 years.
Weird autofocus
While Lichtenstein seems like your run-of-the-mill tech entrepreneur, Morgan has an active presence on social media, where you can find TikTok showcasing artwork inspired by her synesthesia and her “WEIRD AF” music videos.
Heather Morgan, suspected of laundering $4,500,000,000 in Bitcoin, often uploaded her videos to TikTok under the username “realrazzlekhan”. She raps: “Following the rules is for fools, instead I work with edge cases with my tools” pic.twitter.com/bHbsf9QPGf — vx-underground (@vxunderground) February 9, 2022
And you don’t want to miss them – there are gems among them, like “I’m the grandma you want to fuck,” Morgan, in her early thirties, raps while sitting in a bathtub full of glitter during her song “Versace Bedouin.” “. The question is how to get from a rapper to the center of the investigation of hacker attacks by the FBI?
According to her LinkedIn, she started her career working as an international market economist in Asia and the Middle East, including post-revolutionary Egypt after the Arab Spring.
Heather Morgan’s garbage fire on LinkedIn’s public page includes not only this deranged clothing choice, but: “When traveling abroad, her favorite pastime includes trading in informal markets and feeding crocodiles.” https://t.co/2ptack1FsK pic.twitter .com/Rkfq1Y2Zsw — Sarah Solomon (@sarahsolfails) February 8, 2022
When she returned to California and eventually moved to Silicon Valley, she “dipped into the world of tech startups. In 2009, she founded SalesFolk, a B2B cold email company.
I bet you will all think twice about your online presence before stealing $4 billion now as well — CryptoFinally (@CryptoFinally) February 9, 2022
Although she only started her rap career in 2018, she has clearly been rehearsing her lines for a while. The company’s slogan “Be a goat, not a sheep!” has the right balance of absurdity and arcane philosophical reference, which is surprising it didn’t come straight from one of her tracks.
Surprisingly, Heather Morgan gave a talk at the New York Salon (an event I used to host with @ruthienachmany) in 2019. Here is her talk: pic.twitter.com/RFovec0tek — Tarun Chitra (@tarunchitra) February 8, 2022 G.
Meanwhile, she has also been collecting several signatures in business and tech publications, such as her December 2017 article “Should Your Company Be Worried About Being Blacklisted” and her seemingly well-informed June 2020 article “Experts Share tips to protect your business from cybercriminals. of which were published in Forbes. She also has an extensive author profile for Inc. magazine.
