On the same day that Bitcoin broke $60,000 for the first time in over two years, the government transferred funds.
After taking $922 million in Bitcoin from Bitfinex in 2016, the US authorities moved the funds from two cryptocurrency wallets.
The payments made by the US government happened on February 28, the same day that Bitcoin broke $60,000 for the first time in over two years. In the twenty-four hours before 9:45 p.m. UTC, Bitcoin’s price increased 5.52%, reaching $62,507. A week ago, the first cryptocurrency in the world saw an increase of more than 20%.
The first test transfer took place at 3:39 pm on February 28th and was valued at a meager 1 bitcoin ($60,200 at the time of transfer). According to data from Arkham Intelligence, the U.S. government-labeled wallet made four transactions shortly after, totaling 12,267 Bitcoin ($748.46 million), two transactions costing 2,817 Bitcoin ($172.74 million), and one transaction worth 0.01 Bitcoin ($613.35).
In 2016, after a cyberattack on Bitfinex, the authorities confiscated over 119,754 BTC, which is equivalent to more than $7.4 billion at the current price.
These transactions took place only one day after hacker Ilya Lichtenstein revealed his plan to steal and launder about $4.5 billion worth of Bitcoin from the Bitfinex exchange at a court hearing in Washington.
Bloomberg states that Lichtenstein claimed to tell a jury on February 27 that he had hacked into Bitfinex’s servers for many months in addition to Coinbase and Kraken, among others.
Heather Morgan, better known by her stage name Razzlekhan, and Lichtenstein were both taken into custody in February 2022. At the time, the United States authorities said they were involved in a plot to launder $4.5 billion in stolen Bitcoin, with $3.6 billion of that amount confiscated in the biggest financial seizure ever. On August 3, 2022, the authorities confiscated an extra 475 million bitcoins.
In August 2023, Lichtenstein and his wife admitted to conspiring to launder money in relation to the Bitfinex breach. The money launderers at Bitfinex are supposedly the subject of a film that Amazon has begun production on. According to rumors, the screenplay will be based on a 2022 New York Times unit on the pair, which dubbed them “Bitcoin’s Bonnie and Clyde.”
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