At the height of the pandemic in 2020, when she wasn’t teaching herself Russian, creating Salvador Dali-inspired art or recording rap songs about the excesses of Wall Street, Heather Morgan was very concerned about cybersecurity.
“Cybercriminals and fraudsters are taking advantage of this unexpected disruption, leading to a spike in scams and cybercrimes,” Morgan, an “entrepreneur,” wrote in a June 2020 column for Forbes. She added that she was particularly concerned about elderly victims being vulnerable to online scams.
“People are not always as they appear online,” she wrote.
Oh, the irony.
Morgan, 31, and her Russian-born husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, 34, now stand charged by the DOJ with trying to launder an astounding $4.5 billion in cryptocurrency. And the self-described “crocodile of Wall Street” is the gold-bomber-jacket-wearing poster child for cybercrime.
Morgan and Lichtenstein were arrested at their high-rise Wall Street apartment Tuesday for allegedly attempting to launder Bitcoins that had been stolen from Hong Kong’s Bitfinex, one of the world’s largest virtual cryptocurrency exchanges, in 2016. It’s not clear if the couple was involved in the initial hacking that led to the Bitcoin theft.
The stolen cryptocurrency was allegedly transferred to a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein, who describes…
