[ominous music playing]
[discordant electronic music playing]
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[Janczewski] Executing search warrants
is pretty stressful.
You're on high alert
for security and safety.
In this case, we were looking
for $4 billion of stolen bitcoin.
You could prepare for many things,
but that can only get you so far.
You don't know
what someone's reaction's gonna be
when you're standing
between them and freedom.
You never know
what you're going to encounter
until you get in through the door.
There's always gonna be
some level of surprise,
but these were some of the more
unique people we encountered.
[cooing and tittering]
They were the first aspiring rappers
that I arrested, that's for sure.
Everyone worries too much
About what's proper
But not Razz
No shame, that don't stop her
[newscaster 1] The Department of Justice
announcing the arrest of two individuals
in Manhattan this morning.
[newscaster 2] Back in 2016,
hackers broke into an online
currency exchange,
stealing 120,000 bitcoin,
which at the time was worth $70 million.
But today,
it's worth a staggering $4 billion.
[newscaster 3] Agents seized tokens
from digital wallets
belonging to husband and wife
Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan.
When you talk about the arrest of people
involved in a $4.5 billion heist,
you think that the criminals behind it
are gonna be these serious,
hardened people.
But in reality,
the people behind this particular case,
they are these wacky, cringy individuals
who are posting these
totally insane videos on social media
while they are trying to pull off
this incredible crime.
[Heather] Razzlekhan!
I'm a motherfuckin' bad b*tch
Go on, make me a sammich
That was cringe.
That was trash.
Holy hell!
It can't be real.
[laughs]
It's so bad, that it might be good.
[Siegel] It was incredibly shocking
to see that she had been living
so publicly for so long.
How could this person
possibly have engaged
in this level of sophisticated
on-chain money laundering?
That absolutely does not make sense.
It doesn't.
I know criminals, real-life criminals.
This guy's not a criminal.
There's still so many questions
in this case.
There are informants, secret agents,
issues of national security,
theories that stretch all the way
to the Kremlin and back to the '80s,
and hackers who may
be working for the government.
And at the center of it all
is this couple,
who are posting the most bizarre,
insane videos.
Lies, deceit.
[Martire] There's holes we don't know.
The FBI's not saying things.
There's a lot of things that don't make
any sense in this case. I smell bullshit.
[intense music playing]
[music fades]
[man] He's led some of the nation's
most important cryptocurrency-related
criminal investigations.
Please welcome Chris Janczewski.
[applause]
[Janczewski] As a special agent
with the Internal Revenue Service,
I was in charge of investigating cases
with money laundering.
So my spectrum of cases went
from child exploitation investigations
to t*rror1st financing
to North Korea hacks.
My last case as an agent
was the investigation
into the 2016 hack of Bitfinex,
which got the attention
of news media from around the world.
[newscaster] More than $70 million
worth of bitcoin,
the online digital currency,
has been stolen
in the second-largest hack of its kind.
The hack targeted Bitfinex,
a Hong Kong-based platform
where customers can exchange bitcoins
for US dollars.
Bitfinex is one of the top ten
cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
This was a period when there had been
other hacks of other exchanges,
and those exchanges
had declared bankruptcy.
So this was a devastating moment
for this company.
This hack could end
all the hopes and dreams of the founders
and, indeed, many of the customers.
[Cavazos] The day of the hack,
I logged into Bitfinex.
As soon as I logged in,
I saw a big $0.00 on my account.
I was in complete shock.
I had anxiety. Like, hot sweats.
I looked on Reddit,
and there was lots of buzz
about how there potentially
might have been a hack.
I had put in $10,000.
It was a significant portion
of my net worth.
I spent years saving up this money
so that I could have a shot
at buying a house and going to school.
It was a gut punch when it disappeared.
And I was just one of many victims.
When these multimillion-dollar
hacks happen,
it's often a rogue country.
It's Russia. It's Ukraine.
It's Iran. North Korea.
It's !sis.
And then they use this money
to try to fund terror groups
or destabilize governments,
which is why these hacks
are often an issue of national security.
[Janczewski] Homeland Security
initiated an investigation
shortly after the hack took place in 2016,
but were only able to get so far
because the hack of Bitfinex itself
seemed very complicated.
[Johnson] With Bitfinex,
you've got a very competent attack.
The way that I know
is because of my experience as a criminal.
The United States Secret Service,
they called me
the "Original Internet Godfather."
I was placed on the United States'
most wanted list.
Credit card schemes, phishing attacks,
stimulus fraud, synthetic fraud.
You name it.
I was on the ground floor
developing, refining, outright doing it.
[dramatic music playing]
[Johnson] When I look
at the Bitfinex hack,
if I'm an attacker,
I'm scanning that environment
for any known exploits.
The person who broke into Bitfinex
had access to their servers for months.
This hacker modified the backend code
so it sends them customers' passwords
as people log into the system.
[Janczewski] Once the hacker
was able to gain access,
they ex*cuted a script
to automatically transfer over funds,
and then took actions afterwards
to delete a lot of the access logs.
Think of trying to erase fingerprints
after the scene of a crime.
[Johnson] Knowing how
to cover your tracks,
that's something that you learn
from trial and error.
We're talking about
a very competent criminal
who understood what needed to be done
to be successful.
Criminals usually are at the forefront
of some of these technologies.
It takes a long time for the government
to even understand how it works,
and they're always a step behind.
And so with this particular case,
they kind of hit a dead end,
and the case went completely cold
until the crypto boom.
[newscaster] Overnight,
the price of bitcoin
went through $11,000
for the very first time.
[Bilton] The crypto boom
during these years was, without question,
the most insane moment
in financial history.
Five years ago, I was actually
a taxi driver. Then I found crypto.
I was still working in a grocery store.
Three years later, I bought my Bugatti.
[engine revving]
I'm no different than anyone else
who walked in off the street
and decided to buy bitcoin.
There was no way for anybody to prepare
for how fast and furious
the technology was gonna come at us,
for how much money we were gonna make
in such a short period of time.
It was just insanity.
At that time, the stolen Bitfinex funds
were growing and growing,
and the Bitfinex hacker
was sitting on the fortune of a lifetime.
To give you a sense
of how much money $4.5 billion is,
if you spent $100,000
every single day for 100 years,
you'd still have close
to a billion dollars left over.
You don't sit on that much money
for that long without moving it,
without withdrawing it.
[Janczewski] In 2020, some of the funds
from the Bitfinex hack started to move,
and that caught my attention.
At that point,
the hack had been a bit of a cold case.
So I thought, let's give it a whirl
and see if we can make some progress here.
I think what's unique
about cryptocurrency investigations
is that the public blockchain
is the crime scene.
The blockchain is a public ledger
where you can go and see the transactions,
but you can't see who is responsible.
[Bilton] The money that was stolen
from the Bitfinex hack went into a wallet,
which is essentially like a bank account
that's visible
to everyone on the blockchain.
So law enforcement
can watch this Bitcoin wallet,
and they can try to monitor it
to see if any of the bitcoin is taken out.
But they can't seize the money
without the password.
[Janczewski] You could think of it
as a bank robbery
where the money came and sat outside.
You can see it sitting there on the curb,
but you can't physically touch it.
You just watch it move to the next block
and keep kind of running away from you.
So I went on the blockchain
and just clicked around on the website
and tried to follow the money.
But after hundreds of thousands
of transactions,
it can be very hard to keep track.
Around 2020, blockchain analytics software
started to peak,
and companies like TRM Labs
were able to help with our investigation.
At TRM Labs, we trace and track
the flow of funds in cryptocurrency
to build investigations.
Bitcoin lives and moves outside
of the traditional financial system
in these virtual currency exchanges.
These exchanges are essentially banks
in the cryptocurrency space.
The Bitfinex hackers
used automated transactions
to move these stolen funds
from exchange to exchange
in order to evade
law enforcement detection.
But we were able to help identify
that the hacker put some of the funds
into the darknet market
called AlphaBay.
AlphaBay is basically
the eBay of criminal goods and services.
Things like trafficking drugs
and laundering cryptocurrency.
So if I'm the guy who hacked Bitfinex,
I'm taking my bitcoin, and I'm throwing it
in a tumbler, a mixer like AlphaBay,
where it's mixing with other bitcoins,
and hopefully it's gonna give me bitcoin
that's not connected
to that Bitfinex hack.
AlphaBay broke up the trail
on the Bitcoin blockchain.
So think of it as you walk into a bank
with a $100 bill,
and you go out to the ATM
and pull out a different $100 bill.
Like if you were following
that first bill, the serial numbers,
you'd be following the wrong trail.
And so, a darknet market like AlphaBay
can be a black hole for information
for following the flow of funds.
[Johnson] If you're law enforcement,
you realize that, hey,
a lot of the information's on AlphaBay.
So what do you do?
Today, the Department of Justice
announces the takedown
of the dark web market, AlphaBay.
[Redbord] Once AlphaBay was taken down,
law enforcement
was able to seize their servers.
And ultimately, those servers
provided a treasure trove of data
for investigators.
You're talking about
millions or billions of records.
[Janczewski]
With the records from AlphaBay,
a lot of the momentum
in the case started to pick up.
I started mapping the flow of the funds,
making this spiderweb
of tens of thousands of transactions
in various accounts.
And one of those accounts
tied back to two people
at 75 Wall Street in New York City.
[Janczewski]
There's this level of excitement of,
"Okay, we've got a good breakthrough."
But it's also the beginning
of when a lot more work starts.
You know, you go back,
start going through the evidence,
seeing what other leads you've uncovered.
But the thing that kept happening
every time we got to the center
of the spiderweb,
we hit accounts that were in the name
of Mr. Lichtenstein and Miss Morgan.
[intense music playing]
[gasps]
Hey!
[Bilton] When I first went
to Heather's social media,
the thought that went through my head was,
"Holy sh*t,
the federal government got it wrong."
" There's no way
these two stole all that money."
[Heather] ...it's really not good.
[Bilton] If I know there is a potential
I could go to jail the rest of my life,
I wouldn't post bizarre,
eccentric, f*cking insane videos.
What?
I like trash, I like cash
I like my potatoes mash
[Bilton] I've talked to people
who were investigators on the case
who literally said, "Holy sh*t"
when they first saw Heather's videos.
If my lovely husband dies,
I will have plenty of f*ck.
[Janczewski] I felt some level of surprise
seeing all the videos.
But the mass amount of social media posts
was actually a benefit for us
because they're sh**ting videos
inside their apartment.
Going for that crazy rich Asian vibe
meets a creepy museum.
I have a lot of weird stuff in here.
You want to see?
[Janczewski] They're giving you
an opportunity to look inside
and see what's going on
that you otherwise would not get.
You could see potentially
there's furniture in the background.
Did somebody buy furniture
at one point using stolen bitcoin?
Despite maybe not wanting
to watch all the videos,
you have to get all the evidence you can.
We started looking into their backgrounds
to see if they actually had the means
to carry out the crime
they're alleged to be doing,
and we learned that Miss Morgan
had connections to Silicon Valley.
I learned from some really smart people
in Silicon Valley when I lived there.
All of them were entrepreneurs
in the tech space.
[intriguing music playing]
Heather was always looking
for the next best thing
and how she could get involved with it.
I became good friends
with her during university.
We both studied international relations
and economics,
and she wanted to break into her career.
[vibrating]
[James] I got the sense,
from numerous conversations,
that she just wanted
to be as big, as well-known,
and as powerful as she could be.
It seemed like Heather
was gonna do something big,
and she wanted to show
the whole world who she was.
[Bilton] When Heather shows up
in Silicon Valley,
it's in the modern-day gold rush.
You could see people who would
literally go from being worth nothing
to being worth
millions of dollars overnight.
At the time, there was this group
that was developed called 500 Startups.
And the idea was that these investors
would find 500 different startups
to invest in,
and if they were lucky, one of them
would be the next Facebook.
Heather desperately wanted
to break into this fold,
and she tried all these
different approaches to try to get in.
It wasn't easy, but she zeroed in
on one specific founder
who was willing to give her a chance.
Hello, my name is Hussam.
I'm the CEO and founder of Tamatem.
I was one of the first companies
from the Middle East
to join 500 Startups,
and I wrote on Twitter that I am
very excited to be in this program.
And Heather replied to my tweet,
saying that she had some experience
by living in Jordan.
And this is how
we actually decided to meet.
The Middle East is huge
with great potential,
but people don't know about that here,
and we're changing that.
[Giancarlo] She was not quite
like everyone else.
She kind of marched to the beat
of her own drum, I suppose.
She was always the center of attention.
She thrived in that kind of environment.
She had, like, this waffle maker
that she would bring to the office,
and she would create
so many different types of waffles.
She seemed happy,
especially that she was
starting to form new relations
and new friendships.
She was really good at identifying people,
figuring them out,
and then pursuing them to close the deals.
So, my name is Ilya Lichtenstein.
I'm the co-founder...
[James] Heather and Ilya met
when Heather had gone to a conference
and had seen Ilya speak in person.
And I remember her talking about
being captivated by what he was saying.
So Ilya was a mentor at 500 Startups.
He used to have a startup
that was acquired at one point.
I'm here in San Francisco with Ilya,
who is the co-founder and CEO of MixRank.
[Martire] I met Ilya on the phone.
He's a typical Silicon Valley,
like, nerdy co-founder.
MixRank was actually one of my first
angel investments that I made
as an entrepreneur.
I remember like a week after I invested,
he had told me, all excited,
"Mark Cuban just invested."
So I had a lot of expectation
for the company.
So MixRank is a giant database of ads.
We analyze
hundreds of thousands of sites every day,
pick up all the ads on them,
and try to figure out what the most
effective ones are for any advertiser.
When Heather
sort of introduced me to Ilya...
So my first question for you is...
...I thought,
"Yeah, this is a sort of mysterious guy."
"I don't really know anything about you,
but he has ambition."
Definitely Heather's type.
Heather referred to Ilya as "Dutch."
We never really knew
why he had that nickname,
but our group kind of came
to know him as Dutch.
[Heather] Dutch, what the f*ck
are you doing?
I remember he brought
a gift to her at that time.
It was like a basket of chocolate.
She was excited, but at the same time,
she did not want anyone
to know more details.
[James] I think he wanted
to pursue her in a romantic way,
and she didn't want that initially.
And I think after much persistence,
they finally got together.
[Larick] I was originally connected
with Heather and Ilya
through a dear friend of mine
who worked for MixRank.
In San Francisco, it's a tough market.
So to get talent,
you really have to do a recruiting video.
People want to hear about making money.
They want to hear
about growth opportunity.
We are at a point
where we have initial product market fit.
We have good revenue growth.
We have over 100 customers.
"We're not your workplace.
We're your family."
You know, the same shtick.
We're not a company where you come in
and you have your co-workers.
We're friends.
[Martire] MixRank finally
started to expand,
hiring more people, getting more clients.
Actually moved to bigger office spaces.
We hit seven-figure revenues last year.
[Martire] I remember
going to San Francisco
and seeing the new office space
and being excited.
I was in communication
with their team to do a product video,
to do a bunch of other
kind of deliverables for them.
But during that time, Ilya disappeared.
Not really saying anything to anyone,
not talking to anyone afterwards.
It was just... he was there one day,
and he was gone the next.
[Martire] It was so weird.
It seemed like the company was doing well.
After all that hard work,
you would think he'd stay in a bit longer.
[Bilton] I spoke to lots of people
that worked with Ilya at MixRank.
Silicon Valley is a place
where 95% of all startups fail,
and here was one that was on its way
to being one of the successes,
if not already a success.
It makes you wonder what is the drive
to leave all of this work behind?
When you have that mindset where you say,
"Well, I'm free to do anything now."
"I don't have to stress
about paying the bills."
I think that's the richest
you'll ever feel.
It's basically just
an incredible sense of freedom.
[Larick] When Ilya exited MixRank,
it would have been the end of 2016.
So it would have been kind of right there.
[dramatic music fading]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Janczewski] They had gone on vacation
shortly after the 2016 hack,
which seemed, you know, in my mind,
maybe this was like a celebration trip.
[Asuzano] Heather mentioned that
they've been successful in their business
and that she was going to be
moving to New York with Ilya
because they want to be
at the center of the culture of America.
I'm just in front of a little
New York brownstone. That's what's up.
I thought the move
to New York was pretty abrupt.
I thought maybe they needed
a change of scenery, change of pace.
[interviewer] Did they seem wealthy?
[Martire] No.
Everybody in tech is a little comfortable.
So like in terms of the average American,
yeah, slightly above that.
But no--
No, no.
Not $4 billion in the bank.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Bitcoin is very bad for crime
because every single human being
in the world with a phone or a computer
can see exactly
what transactions you're making.
And you can follow them, right?
It's almost this perfect storm.
They have so much money,
and the hack itself was so public,
that it made it almost impossible
to ultimately off-ramp the funds.
[Johnson] In order to convert
bitcoins into cash,
I must go through a centralized exchange.
These centralized exchanges,
a lot of them require a verified identity
in order to set up that account
and to cash that account out.
They found themselves in the situation
where they couldn't go and get the money
because it would mean that they would
have to show who they were.
They would have to show their real IDs
and their real photos,
social security cards, all these things,
which would, of course,
have tied the hack back to them.
So as they're trying
to launder this money,
it appears that it keeps getting stuck
in all these different accounts.
[Redbord] So they just kept
moving them around.
It was almost like
they were thwarted at every turn.
[Janczewski]
Trying to launder these proceeds
becomes like his full-time job.
But while we were
tracing the transactions,
we did see legitimate business activity.
I'm gonna get back to work
because I have a lot
of work to do right now.
[Janczewski] We found Miss Morgan
had the business SalesFolk.
We wanted to dig in
to see what is this company?
[Heather]
Hey, Heather from SalesFolk here.
A lot of people wonder,
you probably are too,
"Heather, how do you manage so many people
when you're the only co-founder?"
I'm gonna tell you my secret.
Vietnamese coffee with goat milk.
[goat bleating]
Just kidding.
SalesFolk, from hearing this spiel
over and over and over,
is a particular cold email
marketing technique
that will get you more responses
than maybe your standard cold email.
Hi, I'm Heather Morgan,
the CEO and founder of SalesFolk.
And in the last 10 years,
I've written more than 10,000 cold emails.
[Molina] Heather and I met when
she was looking for a marketing intern.
My first impression of Heather,
she was elegant, she was professional,
she was very well-versed
in what she knew about the industry.
I saw her articles
on Forbes and Inc. magazine,
and I liked the way
she wrote those articles.
At first, I was just going to manage
Heather's posts on Twitter and Instagram.
But then, after a couple of weeks,
Heather introduced Razzlekhan to me.
And that's when everything shifted.
Don't hate
This ain't a debate
We ain't gonna date
Even though I make you
Wanna masturbate
You just stagnate
No, thanks
What? Razzle-dazzle
[guttural hacking]
It was very raunchy.
So my only reaction was like,
"All right, cool."
And then she mentioned something like,
"It's supposed to be funny.
It's supposed to be out there."
"It's supposed to be
even ridiculous at some point."
And I agreed with her.
I told her,
"There's brilliance in stupidity too."
[dramatic music playing]
[Bilton] Heather ended up posting a video
explaining why she created
this persona called Razzlekhan.
A couple years ago, I was working a lot.
And I got really burnt out.
I think I was pretty unhappy.
I don't know. I think I was searching
for something more.
And that's probably why
I had interviewed Awkwafina.
My vag speaks five different languages
It told your vag
"b*tch, make me a sandwich"
[Heather] Basically,
she said that Awkwafina
is much more confident
and more shameless than Nora.
That moment definitely solidified
this idea to pursue an alter ego.
[Bilton] If you're Ilya and Heather
and you have this money,
you're probably kind of terrified
of being caught.
People deal with anxiety
and stress and tension differently.
Some people start having panic attacks.
Some people start obsessively exercising.
It's steam going through you
that has to come out some way.
I think for Heather,
the creation of Razzlekhan
and the rapping was the steam valve.
When I say the word
I'm a tough f*cking nerd
Yeah, I might be absurd
Flashy like a rare bird
[Christine] Razzlekhan is Heather
times 100.
Heather was already out there,
but Razzlekhan is way out there.
Making that buck
Don't be dumbstrucked
Never get stuck
Oyster get shucked
[Asuzano] When Heather developed
the persona of Razzlekhan...
Razzlekhan!
...I wasn't at all surprised.
When I was living with her in university,
she would actually
just try to rap a few bars.
She would like to have a lot of influence
with her Turkish background.
[Molina] After Heather
shared her music with me,
I told her that I was a filmmaker.
And then that occurred to her
that we could collaborate
and do something together.
Razzlekhan here, walking on set with crew.
We should wait here for everyone else.
Funny enough, "Versace Bedouin"
is the first music video
that I've ever directed.
Razzlekhan, the Versace Bedouin
Come real far
But don't know where I'm heading
m*therf*cking crocodile of Wall Street
Silver on my fingers
And boots on my feet
Always be a GOAAnd not a g*dd*mn sheep
I remember a lot of people stopping
at Wall Street when Heather was dancing.
A lot of tourists were taking pictures
because it was kind of wild.
[Molina laughs]
- [Heather] Signature Razzlekhan.
- [Molina] All right.
"Versace Bedouin"
was her signature music video
that was gonna launch
her career, pretty much.
And when I showed her the final product,
she was happy with it.
She said, you know, "Let's do it."
"Let's just put it on YouTube
and let's let it blow up." Mm-hmm.
[whimsical music playing]
Once "Versace Bedouin" came out,
it was not what Heather expected.
We didn't have, like,
a million views or anything like that.
We had some negative reviews,
negative comments.
Some people saying, you know,
"Don't do this. Don't hurt your image."
It was quite tough to read, mm-hmm.
I usually send
all my film work to my parents.
"Versace Bedouin"
was the exception of this.
I mean, I told them,
"I just made a music video."
"Just take my word for it."
"It's pretty nice,
but just take my word for it."
[interviewer] And what did you
think of the song?
[laughs] You're not gonna ask me that.
[interviewer] Do you remember
the first time you saw the videos?
[chuckles]
Uh...
Yeah, it's...
Certainly the videos were unique.
But, like, it's still a serious thing.
We're still investigating,
you know, a felony.
[Bilton] At this point
in the fed's investigation,
the financial picture doesn't add up.
Heather is writing for Forbes,
and she's making
maybe $100 to $150 per post.
And while she was doing a little bit
here and there with SalesFolk,
her focus was on Razzlekhan.
And then at the same time,
Ilya creates a new startup,
and he calls it Endpass.
[announcer] Meet Endpass.
We protect your funds
with multiple layers of security.
[Bilton] It's unclear
if it's making money,
and yet they seem to be
living a life of luxury.
I thought they were doing
really well in New York.
Heather's apartment,
it was actually very, very nice.
It seemed like she lived
this international lifestyle.
They're traveling first class
more often than not.
[Janczewski] They weren't exactly
living like Pablo Escobar
and having gold toilets
or something crazy that I knew of.
But there was a level of spending money
that was potentially
outside of their means.
Where did the cash come from?
I know from my own experience
of being a special agent for 13 years,
if you have to ask the question,
that's probably a good sign
of money laundering.
[Bilton] When you start to dig into it,
you start to see
that it appears Heather and Ilya
have all these fake employees
that are working for them.
These employees,
they have no social media accounts,
no references, no posts, anything.
Some of them did have fake LinkedIns,
but no other job or anything.
And yet, Heather and Ilya
start paying these fake employees
millions of dollars in bitcoin.
One of the accounts used to launder funds
was in the name of a young woman.
She had received millions of dollars
of a privacy coin,
which seemed atypical to me.
As part of setting up the account
to prove who she was,
she submitted a utility bill.
But I've been following money
to other accounts,
and I recognize that utility bill
was used in another account.
So it was the exact same utility bill,
photoshopped to have a different address.
We started seeing
that there were connections
with Miss Morgan's business, SalesFolk.
One of the clients
was apparently paying in bitcoin
to the tune
of tens of thousands of dollars,
a substantial amount
for marketing services.
But then when digging in to see
who is this client, who is this company,
there was almost no footprint
of this person, this company, online,
which seems ironic considering
you're paying for marketing services.
I have this obsession about investigations
of trying to get the answer.
I kind of see it like a hunt.
I kind of just keep thinking,
"What would their next step be,
and how can I counter that?"
I go about my day working,
maybe watch football,
and then something clicks.
I don't wait to the next day.
I want to find out that night.
I was determined to figure out
what exactly happened,
especially seeing them acting
as if they might have gotten away with it.
[off-key piano music playing]
When I first met Heather,
she was like, "Oh, I love your mustache."
That was the first thing she said.
I love partying with my bros,
but Heather,
she had a different light to her.
She didn't want to sound and do anything
that you see right now
in the music industry.
She wanted to be totally weird
and different.
[indistinct chatter]
I'm starting to rap about g*y men!
[Southerland]
She couldn't rhyme that good.
That's why she wanted me
to help her with her rhymes.
We literally would just say something,
and she would write it down.
And she's like,
"Oh, we're gonna use that."
My family has a history of hanging out
in cemeteries for generations.
[Southerland] The first song we did
was "High in the Cemetery."
Getting high in the cemetery
Next to Grandpa's grave
f*ck the park
It's full of f*ck sex sl*ves
[Southerland]
That was the first song we wrote.
Can I play the verse of it,
- like, of the song?
- [interviewer] Yeah.
- Okay.
- [hip-hop music plays on phone]
Wow, I haven't rapped this in forever,
but I'm gonna do it.
Puff, puff, pass
I love me some grave grass
Getting high in the cemetery
Getting high in the cemetery
[acoustic music playing]
[Southerland] Heather wanted to record.
So I was like, "Hey, I got this little
in-house studio, Brooklyn studio."
"Oh, no, no, no.
I need, like, something big."
Like, pretty much go big, go home.
So I was like, "Quad. You wanna do that?"
She said, "Yeah."
Gave her the info to Quad, she booked it.
She was showing me
she could splurge money.
She exposed me to that rich life
that I never had.
She can pay for what I needed.
Like if I needed jewelry,
if I needed some clothes...
Telling me money is not an issue.
And I'm showing her like,
"Hey, I got the parties."
"I got the clubs.
I can get us on the VIP list."
[no audio]
Heather would show up randomly
at, you know, my art shows,
and we became friends over time.
Heather would always bring a six-pack,
or she'd bring some champagne.
You know, basically create the party.
She had an expensive cat,
like $2,000 for sure.
I was like, "That's an expensive cat,"
and I was like, "I want one, but I don't
have the money for one of those."
[Heather] So wait, you're telling me
that you were buying Clarissa's food?
I was buying-- I taste all her cat food.
I tasted her Tiki Cat,
and I'm like, "This is pretty good."
It needs salt. It needs pepper.
But other than that, it's pretty good.
Show her, don't show me.
[Southerland]
Dutch is a quiet and funny man.
When I first met him at Heather's house,
she was like,
"Hey, I have a stock boyfriend."
"He's in the stocks. He's big business."
Heather told me one time that Dutch
closed this big million-dollar deal.
And I'm like, "What?"
I never even had
a million dollars, you know?
So I'm just like, "Oh sh**t. Wow, cool."
But I didn't think
they were in a serious relationship.
She seemed like
it was business between them,
with benefits.
A lot of the time I was there,
it was just me and Heather,
and Dutch would be isolated in his room.
He would come out
and maybe get a snack, say hey to me,
and went right back in the room.
If he had friends,
yeah, I didn't know about them.
[dramatic music playing]
[Bilton] When I talk to people
for the reporting,
they tell me, "Oh, I don't think
they were a good match."
"I don't think that they
were right for each other."
She wanted to go out and party,
he wanted to stay home.
She was incredibly extroverted,
he was incredibly introverted.
But then when you start
to dig into it more,
I think that these are two people
that actually have a lot more in common
than we actually might think.
While the end result of them,
the grown-up version of them,
was incredibly different,
I can imagine the two of them as children
being very, very similar.
They both were clearly outcasts.
Most people know me for traveling
and living all around the world.
But what they don't know is,
I am not the daughter of a diplomat
or some trust fund guy.
I actually grew up in a small town,
and it's in the middle of nowhere.
[Peevers] Chico has a poor side of town.
It's kind of a redneck area.
[Cannon] I seem to recall
that her living circumstances
were different than most of the students,
that her parents were living farther away.
[school bell ringing]
We offered a lot of AP classes
at Pleasant Valley High School,
and so she must have chosen our school
in order to have a good education.
[Peevers] When I first met Heather,
I saw her just by her lockers
on the way to the cafeteria.
[camera shutters click]
I could tell that she was lonely.
I recall people making fun of her
for being awkward or seeming awkward.
[camera shutters click]
[Heather] Growing up,
I did not have a lot of friends,
and no one really believed in me,
understood me, supported me.
This principal, he told me,
"You're a big fish in a small pond,
but if you go to the ocean,
you might drown."
And I remember thinking,
"Okay, the ocean, yeah, it's big,
but I'm a shark."
[dramatic music fading]
[birds tweeting]
[Serota] Ilya and I grew up in Glenview.
It was very, very white bread.
[mellow music playing]
I met him in the fifth grade.
We were two little white Jewish kids
without much athletic ability.
We just kind of naturally hit it off.
The program we were in
was a very avant-garde,
experimental learning environment.
It was called TREE,
"Technology-Rich Educational Environment."
And we absolutely
gravitated towards computers.
As nerdy kids, we were often bullied.
People would attack his Russian-ness,
and Ilya would play along.
[in Russian accent] "Oh, hello, comrade."
[in normal voice] Ilya's family
moved from Russia,
and he seemed proud
of his Russian heritage.
We were part of this board game club.
Ilya was good at strategy games
in particular, like Risk.
He was very big
on pulling one over on his opponent.
He had kind of a hunger about him,
like he sought power.
He loved to quote Austin Powers,
specifically Dr. Evil.
In exactly five days,
we will be $100 billion richer.
[evil cackle]
"One hundred billion dollars!"
[all laughing]
It's almost like he did grow up
into Dr. Evil, just a little bit.
[James] When I first met him,
I got the assumption
that Ilya was a genius
because the first thing
that I saw Ilya do,
he's playing Overwatch,
but then on his other screen,
he's flipping to writing code.
And he's just going back and forth
between matches and coding.
I had never seen anything like that.
A gamer knows a gamer. I'm a gamer.
I don't think anyone else
picked up on this,
but Dutch is a character from a game
called Red Dead Redemption 2.
[grunts]
[Peevers] He's kind of like
the protagonist the entire time,
until you find out
he wasn't friends with anyone.
He was the antagonist
the whole time at the end.
Now!
[Peevers] He's a bad guy.
I think Ilya liked the moniker Dutch
because of that game.
Maybe he thought
it was similar to himself.
But we got a whole lot of money.
Everything is coming together
exactly as I planned.
It's very clear that Ilya
has got this computer background.
He understands technology.
He understands coding.
But the big question is,
what's Heather's role in all of this?
There are so few instances
where couples commit crimes together.
Bonnie and Clyde are still famous today
because they were a couple
that went on a m*rder-robbery spree.
That doesn't happen all the time.
These characters
have to agree to do this together.
And I keep wondering
if Ilya was the mastermind,
or if the person who was really pulling
all the strings all along was Heather.
I don't know. I truly don't know.
[ethereal music fading]
[Asuzano] When I met Heather
at university,
she was a worldly citizen.
Her father had a lot of travel
for his work,
and so she had lived in Japan
and various countries around the world.
I thought, "Wow, she speaks
all these different languages,
and she's white."
Some of the languages
which I have studied include
Korean, Japanese, Arabic,
Turkish, and, currently, Cantonese.
I first met Heather after having given
a guest lecture at UC Davis.
She was an exceptional student.
[Heather] I earned two Bachelors'.
One in International Relations,
and the other in Economics.
More than anything, I was impressed
by the breadth of her knowledge
about the Middle East and North Africa.
We ended up working together
for about 18 months,
and Heather moved three or four
different times over that window.
She was working in Hong Kong,
then moved to Cairo,
and then, at some point,
she moved to Turkey.
In the beginning, her signature said,
"Heather Morgan, Economist."
At that point,
that was kind of aspirational.
The second six months,
she added "Entrepreneur."
The very final email
I got from her in 2013,
she was Economist,
Entrepreneur, and Hustler.
There was a palpable sense
of restlessness about her.
[Cannon] We have this kind of image
of the AP kids, the bright kids,
as being little angels all the time.
I was a gifted student myself,
and I'll tell you,
they're not immune
from getting into trouble.
They're better at getting away with it
because they're so bright,
people don't expect it from them.
The interesting part about Heather Morgan
is that she was active in crypto.
She had articles
about operational security.
I love cybersecurity a lot.
I have to say,
a lot of very large companies
have plenty of security holes.
Billion-dollar ones.
It seemed like she was always trying
to learn from other people, tech leaders...
Here today talking with Tim Hurson.
Jason Lemkin.
It seems that Miss Morgan had skills
of being able to influence people
and get them to do things.
How to ask the right kinds of questions
to really get through to people
and break down their barriers.
[Janczewski] I saw that Miss Morgan,
on various social media posts,
would say that she spoke other languages.
[in Mandarin] Happy New Year!
[in Cantonese]
[in Japanese] I know Japanese.
Having other languages
could be helpful in laundering funds.
The ability to go to an exchange
outside of the country
and set up an account,
or use other services
that might not be English-centric,
could be of value.
She showed up at conferences,
she was a speaker,
and she talked about things
like hacks and safety.
Uh, what we're here for is to teach you
how to use social engineering
in everyday life.
One very, very common hacking technique
that has been perfected
in some ways by North Korea
is doing something
called social engineering.
Social engineering is basically,
I hate the term "manipulating,"
but it's-- It's getting someone
to share information
or take an action
that they otherwise would not.
So social engineering is when someone
pretends to do something in the real world
or on the phone or something,
to get access to a password.
People will go, and they'll go on YouTube,
and they will get an audio
of a crying baby,
and then they will
get on their phone and they'll say,
"Oh my God, my baby's crying,
and I can't remember my password."
And the person
on the other end of the line,
even though they're not supposed
to give you the password, feels bad,
and they will give you the password.
And that is essentially
a social engineering hack.
They actually target specific individuals
who have access to information
that's necessary to carry out a hack.
Even for like a CEO,
like their virtual assistant
or an office manager or whatever,
just someone lower,
they can give you access.
It takes more effort,
but if you're really determined,
it's worth it.
As she gives this talk,
it's kind of clear to me
that she has these things
she wants to say that she can't,
and she desperately wants to.
It's also clear within the music.
There's literally a line
that she raps about where she says,
"Spear phish your password,
all your funds transferred."
[Heather] Spear phish your password
All your funds transferred
[Bilton] Spear phishing is a type
of social engineering attack.
"Spear phish your password,
all the funds transferred."
Yeah, that does ring a bell.
[chuckles]
That is kind of on brand.
[Heather] The catfishing queen
My tracks always clean
Social engineer, meet me at the pier
[Bilton] And at the end
of Heather's social engineering talk,
people in the audience are clearly like,
"Is this okay, what you're talking about?"
"Like, is this moral? Ethical?"
[man] Do you ever have
any ethical concerns?
[all laugh]
So I'm a realist.
Um, and I do actually believe
that the ends justify the means sometimes.
But, like, you know, nothing I'm doing...
I think my end goals
aren't, like, bad or evil.
Like, I'm not trying to scam someone
out of their money or like...
Like, get someone hurt in any way.
And she pauses for a minute and says,
"I have my own ethics."
Uh, I have my own ethics, I will say.
Uh...
[Bilton] A few years ago,
when I was working on a story,
these federal agents
told me how building a case
is like knitting a sweater.
You take all these threads,
and you start weaving it all together
until it's fully done.
There are connections
between everything with Heather.
The investor Heather
is interviewing people
about cryptocurrencies
that someone could invest in
to help launder money.
Using cold emails and social engineering,
they're all tied in together.
And having the ability
to understand code from Ilya,
it's almost like
all of the skills they had,
there weren't any
that were left in the toolbox.
And so, you can see
how maybe they were the masterminds.
But with this particular case,
it's kind of like a sweater
with lots of holes in it.
There are all these things that don't
add up and don't make any sense.
[dramatic music playing]
[dreamy music playing]
[Giannone] The consensus
among the cybersecurity world
is that there's no way
Ilya committed this hack.
I got involved in this story
almost by mistake, by accident.
But I actually uncovered documents
that shows Ilya Lichtenstein's father
was a hacker.
[computer beeping and chirping]
When I was a teenager,
I was actively involved
in the hacking community,
and I became friends with Brett Johnson.
I built and ran the first organized
cybercrime community, called ShadowCrew.
ShadowCrew is the genesis
of all cybercrime as we know it today.
It was the main communication channel
that online criminals used
at that point in time.
[Giannone] But unbeknownst to everybody,
Brett was actually working undercover
as a Secret Service informant
because he had gotten arrested
for an eBay scam.
[Johnson] My job was to target individuals
and build up investigations against them.
And one of the individuals
that came to him
was a hacker who used the name Deuce.
[Johnson] Deuce doesn't know
that I was an informant,
and he tells me that he'd hacked
into the First National Bank of Indiana.
"But," he says, "I can't cash out."
"Can you help me do that?"
And one day, I walk into the office,
and I'm getting things set up,
and I've got my laptop in front of me.
- [cell phone ringing]
- As I'm opening that up,
my burner phone rings.
And I'm sitting there going, "That's odd.
No one should have this number."
And the individual
on the other end of the line was Deuce.
What he says is, "I know who you are.
I know where you are."
[Giannone] Deuce hacked
into Brett's computer,
and he discovered
that Brett was an informant.
[Johnson] My impression of Deuce
was that he was an apex predator,
but I wasn't able to identify this guy.
Many years later,
I was considering writing a book,
and I put in a blanket request
for any documents related to ShadowCrew.
Ultimately, I received 1,100 documents
from the Secret Service.
And some of those documents
discuss this hack
that Brett had mentioned to me.
[Johnson] John Giannone, he contacts me.
He says he knows who hacked into
that Secret Service computer that I ran.
So he sends me these documents.
And I don't think the kid knew
what he had at that point in time.
The investigative report starts out,
"Yevgeniy Likhtenshteyn, aka 'Deuce.'"
As I'm reading, I'm like,
"You know, man, I know...
I know that g*dd*mn Lichtenstein name
from someplace."
I know that name.
So I google Lichtenstein.
And up pops Eugene Lichtenstein.
He Americanizes his name.
And then I see Ilya Lichtenstein
from the Bitfinex hack.
Brett and I realized, holy sh*t,
this is Ilya Lichtenstein's dad.
[mysterious music playing]
We found out the Secret Service
identified Eugene Lichtenstein in 2005,
and they flew up to Chicago
to pay him a visit
about hacking into their computer
and also about the Indiana bank hack.
Eugene stated that he had moved
to the United States from Russia
approximately 13 years before.
And he admitted
to hacking into that Bank of Indiana,
but he was never charged with anything
because he immediately agreed to cooperate
as an informant for the Secret Service.
Apparently they never reported it,
so he has no criminal record.
And it turned out Eugene Lichtenstein
became a real estate agent in Chicago.
What's kind of amazing
is thinking about
little young Ilya growing up,
seeing his dad interact
with these federal agents
that showed up at his house,
and what that might have done
to a kid like that.
As I investigated the story,
several similarities between Ilya
and his father's
online activities surfaced.
Ilya used the online moniker Deus Machina,
or Deus for short,
whereas his father allegedly
used the name Manus Dei,
which he also later shortened to Deuce.
I believe Ilya is trying to pay
some sort of respect or homage to Daddy.
The father being the hand of God,
the son being the machine of God.
In my opinion,
the Bitfinex hack is awfully similar
to what Eugene did
way the hell back in 2005
when he compromised
the First National Bank of Indiana.
Is it possible
that Ilya was learning from his dad?
Very possible.
And actually, reading through
the government's pleadings,
I think it's possible that all this
may have some ties to larger forces.
One of the things that stood out to me
was they had this trip to Ukraine.
Hey, Razzlekhan here, and I'm in Kyiv.
[Bilton] And what they did there,
as stated later by an attorney,
was quote, unquote,
"Taken out of the pages of a spy novel."
[Janczewski] We found out
they were purchasing
stolen passports, debit cards,
and other identity documents
off the darknet,
being hand-delivered them in Ukraine.
They were picking up parcels
at Ukrainian post offices, from Russia,
and these parcels
contained various identity documents
and other illicit material.
They had schematics of those post offices
so they would know which way
to direct their line of vision
so that their faces
weren't caught on those cameras.
That is not something
that a normal criminal does.
I'm curious to know how they knew
where those security cameras were.
[Johnson] Those types of schematics,
that type of detail,
indicates a "possible"
intelligence connection.
[Giannone] Intelligence agencies
are studying passport control procedures,
post office procedures,
for an operative to go into a post office
to pick up a package
without being identified.
[Janczewski] I'm aware
that some people have suggested
that Mr. Lichtenstein
potentially has connections to Russia,
and that Mr. Lichtenstein's father
also was a hacker himself previously.
One of the beauties of a public ledger,
you can have these
armchair investigators online
trying to solve cases,
but it often can spiral
into conspiracy theories.
Still, throughout the course
of the investigation,
you keep an open mind of, like, could they
be connected to another government?
Could they be doing
something else nefarious
other than just trying
to cash out stolen money?
[Bilton] When they were in Ukraine,
they were trying to set up places
to be and live.
And my belief, and I think the belief
of federal authorities,
is that was their escape plan.
[speaking Russian]
[Bilton] They could go to Russia.
That's where Ilya's from.
He spoke Russian, she spoke Russian,
the cat apparently spoke Russian...
[Heather, in Russian]
Clarissa, I love you.
I wish he had been honest with me,
because if Ilya had been honest with me,
like, "Gianni, I got a bunch of bitcoin
and I don't want to pay taxes on it."
"What do I do?"
The obvious answer, I'm like,
"Ilya, you and your wife
both have Russian passports."
"You pull a Snowden.
You get the f*ck out."
There are all these oligarchs
that do bad stuff,
and they're really good
at hiding stolen money.
[Redbord] Would they have gotten
out of the country, not arrested,
and potentially have access to funds?
Yeah. I mean, that's the move.
[Janczewski] There's the opportunity
that they potentially
could flee the country,
but we were still building our case.
We weren't ready
to apprehend them at that point.
Heather and Ilya had laid the groundwork
for this perfect escape plan,
and it appears that they wanted to have,
essentially, a last hurrah,
because they decided to go get married.
- Hey.
- Hey.
We have an announcement,
an update for you.
We want to tell you
that we think we can have
the wedding this year in 2021.
[Molina] When Ilya proposed to Heather,
there was in Times Square
a whole banner of Heather
and her picture,
and Razzlekhan and all that.
[Christine] The wedding
was kind of a surprise for all of us.
We didn't know how it was going to be.
Knowing Heather and Ilya,
it would be different, essentially.
I'm really excited for this.
It's gonna be an amazing event.
There's gonna be art,
there's gonna be music,
including some new Razzlekhan tracks
that are unreleased that'll be dropping.
It's all about being your real self
and celebrating our love and friendship,
and we would love to have you
come celebrate with us.
We got to the studio space
the morning of the wedding in Culver City,
and immediately,
we saw pictures throughout the space
where, like, their heads
are covered in bags,
almost like a hostage situation.
And there's another one that's similar,
but their tongues are touching each other.
And then you hear the opening notes
to "The Final Countdown."
["The Final Countdown" by Europe playing]
And you see
Heather's wedding entourage come in,
and some of them have
these golden palm fronds
that they're holding up
like Egyptian-style.
[Christine] She was carried
on a palanquin type of situation.
[Giancarlo] And she was dressed in her own
customized outfit that's also bedazzled.
And so we're all
taking pictures and video,
like, of course Heather's gonna do this,
of course this is what her wedding is.
She started rapping, and everyone stood up
and got really into it.
Razzlekhan! The Versace Bedouin!
[Giancarlo] So it's like being
at an exclusive rap party.
It was bizarre. Very bizarre.
She was, like, performing her song.
She was jumping around.
It was crazy. I was like, "You're supposed
to be getting married, not performing."
It seemed way more like Razzlekhan
opposed to Heather,
which I would've thought she would've been
more Heather opposed to Razzlekhan.
[Giancarlo] Heather specifically mentioned
she was debuting a new single.
Moon 'n stars...
It seemed like
it was kind of a love rap song.
I thought it was very sweet
that she had wrote a rap about Ilya.
You know, if I had that type of talent,
I would do it.
You make my heart melt like jelly
I want to go and tickle your belly
Between, like, Heather's rapping
and Ilya's vows
and how devoted he seemed to Heather,
how much Heather seemed to love him back,
it seemed like this couple
that was perfect for each other.
After the ceremony, there's a secret
after-party at a mansion in LA.
[Christine] I remember the house
of the after-party was very extravagant.
It's where all the rich people live.
[all chanting] Razzle! Razzle!
Razzle! Razzle!
[Christine] I knew that she dabbled
in crypto a little bit.
People made money off of crypto,
and a lot of people spend
a lot of money on weddings.
So I didn't really think anything of it.
- [hip-hop music playing]
- [indistinct rap lyrics]
I love that line. Oh my God.
[Bilton] There's a couple
of possible scenarios here.
One is that the feds are onto them,
they know they're gonna get caught,
and this is them
going down in a blaze of glory.
Or they think they're about to get away
with the perfect crime.
In either case,
we're seeing them at the wedding
giving away expensive prizes
to all of their friends and family.
[James] In the wedding,
there was this raffle that happened.
Ilya announced that he was giving away
like an iPhone and a PlayStation.
And they also gave away some gift cards.
[Janczewski] We found out they had
purchased prepaid gift cards with bitcoin.
[Siegel] The gift card thing was so dumb.
This girl was sending
small fragments of $4.5 billion
and buying gift cards.
[Redbord] You realize
the desperation is growing
because at this point,
they've been holding on to
the stolen bitcoin for about five years.
It's like, hey,
it doesn't have to be a lot.
We just want to move
some of this into traditional currency.
[Siegel] I think
that she was grasping at straws,
trying to figure out
how to get the money out.
It's easy to just be like,
"Why would you do that?"
Everybody knows to not use a gift card
that links back to your name and address.
But I can imagine
with like each passing day,
the thought of getting caught
probably was reduced.
Maybe they thought
that the money is clean,
that it's been laundered,
and they could overtly use it.
But with laundering,
you have to be perfect every time.
You have to be correct.
You can't make mistakes.
I kind of think of it like rock climbing.
You can be climbing up a wall
and do it right 99 times.
But on the hundredth time,
if you mess up and fall,
all the times you were perfect,
it doesn't matter, right?
So we were able to trace the gift cards
back to Mr. Lichtenstein and Miss Morgan.
At this point,
the government has a pretty good idea
that Heather and Ilya
are in some way involved in this hack.
But the problem is, law enforcement
doesn't have access to the stolen bitcoin.
They can watch this Bitcoin wallet,
but they can't seize the money
without the private keys.
Private keys are just like passwords.
If you own those,
you own control of the cryptocurrency.
They can be as many atoms
in the known universe
as there are potential guesses
for the private keys.
An agent who works for the FBI
told me it would take 13 billion years
for a computer
to guess the right password.
So finding that password becomes
essentially the holy grail of this case.
[Janczewski] We determined
that we had enough probable cause
to do a search warrant on Mr. Lichtenstein
and Miss Morgan's residence.
[dramatic music playing]
We were hoping we would find
the private keys.
It was early in the morning.
[police radio squawking]
I believe that we woke them both up.
[suspenseful music playing]
They're probably a little bit disoriented.
It was surreal to see them.
Up until that point,
they only existed on a screen.
Now here they are
directly in front of you as a person.
It was like seeing
a movie star in real life.
[Bilton] They gave Heather and Ilya
the option to stay
and watch them go through their stuff,
or to leave and come back in a few hours.
And Heather said,
"Is it okay if I get my cat?"
Do you want to talk about the cat?
Everybody wants to hear about the cat.
Apparently, the cat was pretty frightened
by everybody making entry,
and hid underneath the bed.
So we let Miss Morgan
try to get the cat from under the bed.
[Bilton] But really what she was doing
was she had grabbed her phone,
and she was quickly pressing
all the buttons to try to lock it.
It just wasn't a good look.
[dramatic music playing]
The private keys could be hidden
just about anywhere within the residence.
Could be digital.
Could just be written down
on a piece of paper.
Maybe behind the outlet on the wall,
the bottom of a cereal box,
refrigerator, wherever.
[Bilton] And that is when
they start to find all of these things
that genuinely do look like
they came from a spy novel,
even a bad spy novel.
They find currencies from other countries,
books that had been hollowed out
to be able to hide something,
presumably cash or passports
or a thumb drive with $5 billion on it.
And they found a bag
literally labeled "Burner Phones."
[Janczewski] That was the first time
we had a bag
that was labeled "Burner Phones."
That was a new one.
[dramatic music playing]
[Janczewski] Many people would just assume
that you want to arrest
those people that day.
Certainly, in some cases you do,
but we're still building our case.
You could potentially have everything
you need in a MacBook you just seized,
but until you forensically go through it,
which is a very systematic process
that takes time,
you don't necessarily know what you have.
[Bilton] They'd gotten away
with this crime for five years,
and it's clear
that there's an escape plan.
But just having a burner phone
and all these different currencies
didn't mean that they had broken the law.
What the government needs to find
is the password for this wallet
because without that,
they can't do anything.
After the search warrant,
they were free to go
wherever they wanted to go.
[Bilton] A lot of people wonder
why they didn't go and stay in Ukraine,
where they could possibly get access
to these billions of dollars in crypto.
They had all these fake passports,
and Ilya's got family
in that area of the world.
But it seems like their escape plan
was disrupted by massive global events
that were beyond their control.
[explosions]
[reporter] Over 100,000 Russian troops
are now gathered on Ukraine's borders.
[Bilton] The last place
you're gonna want to be
when you're trying to get rid of multiple
billions of dollars in stolen crypto
is in the middle of a w*r zone.
But either way, you know,
there are so many countries,
and countries that they have ties to,
that don't have extradition treaties
with the United States,
that they could have gone to.
But Heather and Ilya just continued
with their life in New York City
as if nothing is going on.
[Janczewski] After the warrant,
things kind of like cool down.
They go back to their lifestyle.
They're still living in their apartment.
AirPods, AirPods
m*therf*cking AirPods
Where are my g*dd*mn AirPods?
Okay, so Dutch,
can you tell me a little bit
what you thought having a pet--?
Having a pet is completely different.
[Heather] Mm, it's the size of my hand.
[Ilya] Okay.
Who posts about pancakes when you're
gonna go to jail the rest of your life?
It does not add up.
How do the feds
show up at your front door,
raid your apartment,
take all your electronics,
which could tie you
to billions of dollars in stolen crypto,
and you still go out for several weeks
and make these crazy videos?
Nail salons,
I'm sorry if you're in the business,
I just think it's a g*dd*mn scam...
[Bilton] Part of me wonders if Heather
had just become so addicted to the camera
that she couldn't turn it off.
[subdued music playing]
[Janczewski] I remember vividly
that at one point,
Miss Morgan tweeted again.
And it said something like,
"Focus on what impact
you have on the world doing good."
I remember it just
kind of like stuck with me.
It seemed like they were signaling
that they were getting away
with this crime.
It kind of motivated myself
and the team to really, like,
"Okay, we can be doing a better job."
[suspenseful music playing]
I'm sure people expect some,
like, CIA nerve center,
but it's really just
sitting in my home office
in Grand Rapids, Michigan
with my headphones on,
turn the email off, drinking more coffee
than I probably should have,
and going back and looking through
every email, every picture, every document
from the evidence we seized
while trying not to fall asleep.
Then we started finding spreadsheets
that were encrypted
where other files were not,
and so they just stuck out.
And I won't get into
how we accessed the files.
We'll leave it for the FBI
to tell that story one day.
But once we did,
we had this kind of slow burn of like,
"Is this...? Can't be this."
"I think it is this."
And that's when we finally found
the private keys
for 2,000 or so different addresses.
[Bilton] After six years, finally,
they found the keys that unlock
billions of dollars of stolen crypto.
[Janczewski] We moved the bitcoin
to wallets owned by the US government.
It was the longest,
most exciting time of my career.
And it went long into the night,
into the morning,
because nobody wants to be
responsible for hitting the wrong button
and sending $3.6 billion
off to the wrong address.
While neighbors are oblivious
that billions of dollars are being moved
in my home office,
we were making the largest seizure
in the history
of the Department of Justice.
I believe the judge said it was
an electronic smoking g*n at that point.
[energetic music playing]
[Cavazos] I just was on Twitter one day,
and people were talking about,
"Hey, there's some wallets
involved in the 2016 Bitfinex hack."
We got money moving.
We're talking about
billions of dollars moving.
And when I heard that the coins
had been confiscated by the government,
oh man, I was just ecstatic.
I was just vibrant.
[Janczewski] And so, like,
people are aware.
And so we assumed that Mr. Lichtenstein
and Miss Morgan would know
that the funds had been seized.
That put us on a clock.
So we scrambled to then make sure
we can make the arrest.
[suspenseful music playing]
It was like a little bit of dj vu.
We were going back early in the morning,
going to the same door,
knocking, announcing, making entry.
But this time, it ended differently.
We arrested Mr. Lichtenstein
and Miss Morgan right in the hallway area.
I had put the cuffs on Miss Morgan.
That's when they started
speaking to each other in Russian.
I don't know what they said,
and I couldn't repeat it,
but certainly
they were trying to communicate.
[electronic music fading]
[Southerland] I remember,
like, getting this text,
that said, "Hey, I'm a writer
from New York Mag."
"Heather and Dutch,
the FBI came and got them."
I'm like, "What?!"
[newscaster] Tonight, the biggest
bitcoin bust in US history.
I thought it was a scam, a joke.
He was like, "Bro, I'm not kidding."
[Martire] It was the first thing
on my newsfeed.
And the minute I saw it, I'm like,
"Holy sh*t,
I knew Bitcoin Bonnie and Crypto Clyde."
[Siegel] The day we found out
Razzlekhan got caught,
things were insane.
It took about 25 minutes
to find Heather Morgan's Twitter account
and Razzlekhan.
I went through her Instagram
and YouTube account earlier today,
and I can't tell you whether that was
the best part or the worst part of my day.
Heather Morgan should be incarcerated
for at least another 25 years,
purely on the basis
of being unbearably cringe.
[Siegel] It seems like Razzlekhan
had this big dream, right?
She wanted to be famous.
She really wanted her content
to get out there.
You don't make 10,000 videos of yourself
unless you want people to notice you.
And everyone noticed her.
Remember when I said
prisoners should be able
to have their phones
in prison and do TikTok?
I don't say that anymore.
[Molina] When "Versace Bedouin"
blew up three years later now
with the scandal, that was something else.
But, I mean, my parents
saw the video and they were like,
"Oh, that's the music video
that you shot?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
I remember reading in a magazine,
"Yeah, the music, it's not good,
but the 'Versace Bedouin' video
was well-produced."
So, you know, tap on the back.
[Southerland]
It shocked me. It really did.
It shocked me to death.
I mean, don't make it like just me.
Be you also.
They were hackers, man.
They were doing that hacking stuff.
[no audio]
[James] There's a part of this
that feels very dishonest.
It's like the whole time that we thought
that you were one person,
you were somebody completely different,
with this huge amount
of stolen money that you had
that you were using to fund your life
and fund your dreams.
I got the sense that she just
found herself getting in too deep,
into a place that she couldn't
really climb out of.
[soft keyboard music playing]
[Bilton] Just days before
Heather was arrested,
one of her friends posted
a picture of a kintsugi pot.
This is the Japanese pots that are broken,
and then they're intentionally
put back together with gold.
And they're meant to show
that you can be broken
and be put back together too.
And Heather reached out and had said,
in a very un-Heather-like way,
"Life is not good. I feel broken."
[Peevers] I feel worried for her.
I care about Heather.
I don't want her to be in trouble.
[Serota] When I saw Ilya's mug shot,
it was like I saw a ghost.
It was...
harrowing.
But if I could say anything
to Ilya right now,
in a way, I'm kind of proud of you, dude.
You did something that not many people
can say they've done,
even if it was against the law.
Maybe they just got wrapped up
in this idea
that you're not really hurting anyone.
This is fake money. It's Monopoly money.
It's not real.
And if you think about it,
who really did they hurt?
You know,
although valued at a lot of money,
did they really put anyone out
by taking it?
If they took from the poor,
it'd be one thing.
But they kind of Robin Hooded,
if you ask me.
[Cannon] I could see where you can get
hooked in to some kind of fantasy world
where you might lose that connection
between what you're doing,
and then the impact it has
on other people.
[Redbord] It's so easy just to think,
"Well, that's just internet funny money."
But the reality is that these
are real individuals holding these funds,
whose lives were changed
as a result of that theft.
[Cavazos] From the time I was hacked
until about six months after the hack,
that $10,000 that I had invested,
which was 15 bitcoins,
would have been worth close to $250,000.
After the hack, Bitfinex came up
with a compensation plan
to pay back all their customers.
We offered our customers a token,
a token that was worth one dollar.
So, if you lost a hundred dollars,
we would give you a hundred tokens.
And we said that we would
redeem those tokens
as quickly as we possibly could.
[Cavazos] As a victim,
I did receive some compensation,
but it was nothing compared
to the $250,000 I would have had
six months later after the hack.
I don't want the funds they're trying
to put in my account. I want my bitcoins.
You can imagine
that any client of Bitfinex
that had what was much less
in a dollar value,
say 1, 2, 3 bitcoin at the time,
would rather have their 1, 2, 3 bitcoin
now that it's more valuable.
Exponentially so.
The bitcoin will go back to Bitfinex.
As far as Bitfinex is concerned,
we've made all our customers whole.
[Cavazos] The lawyers
for the Department of Justice reached out,
and they say that during the sentencing,
I will be able to state my case,
and because I am a victim,
I will have the opportunity
to get my seized assets back.
[Janczewski] After somebody's arrested,
generally they are free to go
until their trial hearing.
There are two exceptions to where
somebody can be kept in custody,
and that's if you're a flight risk
or a danger to the community.
The government's argument to the judge
was that Mr. Lichtenstein
was born in Russia.
He had another passport.
He had connections to people overseas.
And potentially there was other money
out there still accessible.
And the judge ultimately agreed
and kept Mr. Lichtenstein in custody.
[cell door slams]
[Bilton] Ilya is incarcerated,
while Heather was let out
and was allowed to work from home.
[electronic music playing]
[Redbord] The judge released Heather
because she had certain health conditions.
It was interesting
and a bit of a surprise.
I think they were pointing the finger
during that hearing at Ilya.
[Janczewski] The government has
a very high conviction rate of like 97%
or something like that.
It's in the defendant's best interest,
generally, to try and negotiate a plea
and work down their time.
[Redbord] The question is,
how can they cooperate?
I think they could
really cooperate in two ways.
One, there's still
about a billion dollars out there.
They could give them the location
of that billion dollars.
That would be very helpful.
Another way
is to really sort of help the government
understand the story of this.
So, how did you do this?
What were you thinking?
What were your methods?
Were there websites that you used
that we should be focused on?
That's the type of information that could
be very, very useful to the government
as they build other cases.
[dramatic music playing]
[Johnson] After Ilya was arrested,
if you're law enforcement,
you're just happy as sh*t.
Like, we got him.
He'll get what's coming to him.
[typing]
But I know that Ilya's dad
was this hacker,
and none of that
has been disclosed in the news
in the Ilya Lichtenstein case.
I thought that it was
a miscarriage of justice.
So I thought to myself,
"By God, it's coming out."
Today's episode, episode number 45.
Ilya Lichtenstein.
I've got my little show,
and I start talking.
I'm not the least bit convinced
that Ilya had the criminal expertise
to do this crime.
But it turns out
there was at least one family member
who absolutely had the expertise.
So here is the report about Eugene,
the father of Ilya Lichtenstein.
I've got the documents,
and I start sending the documents out
to everybody that will possibly listen.
FBI contacts, the prosecutor,
the defense attorney,
all these news agencies.
Then all of a sudden,
the case started being postponed,
postponed, postponed,
until finally one day,
it's "a matter of national security."
[suspenseful music playing]
[Giannone] All of a sudden,
the government had this new evidence
that they had to turn over
to the defense counsel.
That information was "TS," top secret.
That's the highest level
of classification out there.
These documents can only be viewed
in these secure rooms
where you can't bring cell phones,
they have radio jammers.
What could that possibly be in this case?
I don't want to become
that conspiracy theory guy.
But there's a whole lot of smoke,
so there's gotta be a fire
there someplace.
[interviewer] They made an announcement
that this was a national security issue?
Oh, I definitely can't talk about that.
- You can't?
- No.
[Redbord] I was a federal prosecutor
who prosecuted national security cases.
And oftentimes, criminal investigations
will touch aspects of national security.
And sometimes,
the intelligence community will say,
"Hey, look, that evidence is too sensitive
to use in a courtroom."
Remember, law enforcement are heads down,
looking at their one case
prosecuting a bad guy.
The intelligence community has very,
very different interests.
I really want to know
what the national security is.
But we're never gonna know.
[dramatic music fades]
[Janczewski] I went to the plea hearing,
which took place in August 2023,
which was important to myself and the team
because we had a lot invested in it.
But it was even more surreal
because that was the day
a former president turned himself in.
There was a almost literal circus outside.
And when Miss Morgan and Mr. Lichtenstein
got to see each other in the same room,
it seemed like there was
a certain level of emotion.
One of the attorneys for defense
asked the judge
if Mr. Lichtenstein and Miss Morgan
could talk to each other,
or hug, or something like that.
The request was denied.
During a plea hearing, the judge
will ask questions of the defendants.
The biggest takeaways,
I think, for the public
was Mr. Lichtenstein admitting
that he was the hacker,
and during the time that he had access
to the Bitfinex infrastructure,
he was able to steal
username and passwords.
I think the biggest thing for me
was just kind of like
hearing people admit
that they were the ones
actually guilty
of doing what we had alleged.
Finally, you have this confirmation
that, yes,
what you thought during this process
is, in fact, true.
During the plea hearing,
Mr. Lichtenstein said
that he operated alone,
and at a certain point, Miss Morgan
got involved in the laundering process.
At first, she said, she kind of didn't
really know what was going on,
but then ultimately learned
the source of the bitcoin was a theft,
and then actually took proactive steps
to help launder the proceeds as well.
Miss Morgan also admitted
that she had destroyed some evidence,
and mentioned a laptop down a trash chute.
We also learned about gold coins
that were buried underground
that were recovered by the government.
She ends up pleading guilty,
and then is let go,
and Ilya has been in prison
for the last several years.
[reporter] Heather, any reaction?
How do you feel today
coming out of the courtroom?
Heather, how do you feel today?
When you guys stole the cryptocurrency,
did you think you'd get away with it?
Or did you think you were
ultimately gonna get caught?
- Do you feel like you were--
- Don't push me again.
[Bilton] And now on social media,
we're seeing these pictures of her
attending crypto conferences?
You have the biggest financial heist
in human history
with all of these issues
of national security we've heard about,
and yet he's the one in jail,
and she's just out
having a grand old time.
[dramatic music playing]
[Giannone] During the plea hearing,
the judge had informed Ilya
that there was an offer to enroll him
in the witness protection program.
That actually stood out to me
because it's like, why would this guy
go into witness protection
over a case like this?
[Redbord] As a prosecutor for a long time,
it's very rare to see witness protection
as part of a plea agreement.
It's very, very rare to see it
in a case involving crypto laundering.
[Giannone] If they do end up
going into the witness protection program,
I don't think we'll hear
anything more about this case.
[Bilton] After the feds
got access to the wallets,
there were still about a billion dollars
that was missing.
And, over time, Ilya has pointed the feds
to a majority of the billion dollars.
But there are still
so many questions in this case
about who was behind this
and how it took place,
and everyone's involvement.
Was it Ilya alone? Was it Heather alone?
Was it both of them together?
Was there someone else
that we don't know about?
There are things that just don't add up
and they don't make sense,
and I know I'm not the only person
who feels that way.
Even Ilya says that.
[dramatic music fading]
["Oblivion" by Grimes playing]
See you on a dark night
See you on a dark night
Oh
See you on a dark night
Oh
See you on a dark night
Oh
See you on a dark night
Oh
See you on a dark night
Oh
See you on a dark...
[dramatic music playing]
[music grows discordant]
[music fades]
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