US Fed seizes $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin: Bitfinex 2016 hack
94,000 BTC has been successfully seized by the US Department of Justice by the hackers, who stole Bitcoin from the Bitfinex exchange.
Bitfinex is a popular crypto exchange. These days, Exchange has grabbed huge attention because of its legal fight with Coindesk to limit its operations with Tether(USDT). In 2016, the Bitfinex exchange faced a hacking attack and lost around 120,000 Bitcoins. At the time of the hacking, the value of this amount of Bitcoin was $60 million. And also it was the ⅙ part of the whole trading volume of Bitcoin on the exchange.
Around a week ago, sleuths spotted activities in the stolen amount of bitcoins. Sleuths noted that 94,000 Bitcoins were transferred to other unknown wallet. After this, the investigation department again became active to take action against the hackers to catch the actors behind the Bitfinex hack.
On 8 February, agents detained two people in New York under the charge of laundering Bitcoin, which was stolen from the Bitfinex exchange.
Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan ( a married couple) will have to appear in court at 3:00 p.m. ET in New York, as per available details by the U.S. Department of Justice press release.
At the time of writing this article, the price of 120,000 Bitcoins is around $4.5 Billion. In the present, the Fed only seized 94,000 bitcoins ( $3.6 billion). The Doj press release noted that there are huge chances that these are the hackers but it is not confirmed that the main hackers are these two individuals.
The press release also explained that they found the private key from the online accounts of these two arrested persons and after that, the agency successfully accessed the bitcoins.
As per the investigation of the US agency and blockchain analytic firms, these arrested people were allegedly controlling the number of bitcoins. These two arrested persons tried to use the AlphaBay named dark web platform to change the Bitcoins into another transaction to terminate the tracking. And also did more than 2,000 mini transactions.
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