‘Sexy horror comedy’: Bitcoin laundering suspect is also ‘raunchy rapper’ Razzlekhan
Heather Morgan, arrested on suspicion of laundering cryptocurrency worth billions, has a second life as performer with ‘more pizzazz than Genghis Khan’
A woman accused of laundering billions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency alongside her husband may end up becoming better known for her excruciating music career as a self-styled “raunchy rapper” called Razzlekhan.
Heather Morgan was arrested along with her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, in Manhattan on Tuesday over their alleged involvement in laundering bitcoin stolen in a 2016 hack of the virtual currency exchange Bitfinex. They are not accused of involvement in the hack itself but face charges of conspiring to commit money laundering as well as to defraud the United States.
However, the charges risk being overshadowed by Morgan’s portrayal of an apparently lavish lifestyle online as a “badass money maker” and performer. The 31-year-old has published an extensive catalogue of rap videos, DIY techniques and other lifestyle issues on social media platforms including Instagram and TikTok, calling herself the “Turkish Martha Stewart” or the “Waffle Queen of Korea”. . .
> On her website, Morgan calls herself Razzlekhan or the “Versace Bedouin … the raunchy rapper with more pizzazz than Genghis Khan”.
>“I’m a real risk taker/pirate riding the flood/I’m a badass money maker,” she raps in one video in which she refers to herself as the “Crocodile of Wall Street”.
“Come real far but don’t know where I’m headed/Blindly following rules is for fools,” she says, gyrating on Wall Street wearing sunglasses, a leopard print scarf, and shiny gold jacket.
Morgan, 31, was arrested along with her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, in Manhattan on Tuesday.
The pair is accused of conspiring to launder 119,754 bitcoin stolen after a hacker broke into Bitfinex and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorised transactions. Justice department officials said the transactions at the time were valued at $71m in bitcoin, but with the rise in the currency’s value, it is now valued at over $4.5bn.
[...] However, thanks to their ubiquitous social media presence, details about Morgan, from California, and Lichtenstein, a dual US-Russian national from Illinois also known as “Dutch”, have emerged since their arrest.
“Her art often resembles something in between an acid trip and a delightful nightmare,” Morgan wrote about herself on her website, Razzlekhan.com. “Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily offended. . ."
READ MORE It's delicious! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/10/sexy-horror-comedy-bitcoin-laundering-suspect-is-also-raunchy-rapper-razzlekhan
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Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein raised money from Mark Cuban and other well-known investors. His wife, Heather Morgan, built a following as a quirky rapper and social media luminary.
By Cyrus Farivar, David Jeans and Thomas Brewster
Heather Morgan and her husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, seemed to lead a successful life as tech entrepreneurs and thought leaders. Lichtenstein invested in startups alongside heavyweights like Marc Benioff and had launched his own company backed by Mark Cuban. Morgan styled herself as a prolific thought leader, posting online articles about women in leadership, and even had an alter ego as a goofy YouTube rapper called Razzlekhan, who talked about success and money.
But they had a secret, according to investigators with the IRS. Morgan, 31, and her husband, Lichtenstein, 34, were arrested in New York on Tuesday and charged with trying to launder $3.6 billion in bitcoin stolen by hackers from the Bitfinex exchange six years ago. If convicted of the charges against them, each could serve up to 25 years in prison. Court documents unsealed this week detail an elaborate scheme to launder and conceal the origins of the stolen bitcoins. Lichtenstein and Morgan are not charged with perpetrating the hack.
Forbes found that as the pair allegedly used a digital wallet to launder the cryptocurrency, they simultaneously styled themselves as self-made entrepreneurs, investing in companies together and, in Morgan’s case, establishing herself as a social media personality.
Since meeting about a decade ago, the two worked hard to gain a foothold in Silicon Valley and New York tech circles. Lichtenstein had proceeded through a series of failed ventures, including running a Ron Paul fan website and setting up a brain-boosting supplements business before co-founding MixRank, now a venture-backed sales and marketing company. Lichtenstein left MixRank abruptly in 2016, the same year that Bitfinex was hacked.
During that time, Morgan cast herself as an expert in “cold email” – unsolicited communications – and parlayed that into writing gigs and appearances at sales conferences.
“She came across as a smooth operator but never in a way that raised suspicions,” said Travis Lybbert, a University of California, Davis economics professor, who hired Morgan as a research assistant in 2011. “She was a very confident young person, professional, who would look for opportunities and create them.”
People who knew the couple said they were shocked by the arrests . .
[...] READ BETWEEN THE MISSING LINES BEFORE ANOTHER EXCERPT
A few months before the Bitfinex hack in August 2016, Morgan became a freelance columnist at Inc. magazine, which described her as having gone from “sleeping on couches to creating a bootstrapped seven-figure business called SalesFolk.” The following year, she also became a contributor to the ForbesWomen section on Forbes.com, where she posted articles about topics ranging from music to food. In one post, Morgan discussed how she had a speech impediment growing up and was bullied by other students in school. . .
> Lichtenstein, for his part, had established himself as a minor player in the New York tech investment world, where, according to the Justice Department, he was living in an apartment at 75 Wall Street, an exclusive block where a typical condo is valued upward of $1 million.
It was an image of success he had been building for a decade. After graduating with a major in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lichtenstein had sought like-minded entrepreneurs and went to Silicon Valley, where he met other techno-libertarians, according to his trail of now-defunct websites and businesses identified by Forbes.
> One of his more notable sites was RonPaulFan.com, which contained a stream of news and support for the one-time Republican presidential candidate who became a famous advocate for cryptocurrency. According to the site’s banner, it was the "#1 source for all Ron Paul news.”
> Lichtenstein also dabbled in selling brain supplements around this time, claiming to have created one called Instant Focus that promised to “turbocharge your productivity,” which he said helped him “code longer and be more productive” in a post on Hacker News in October 2010.
> He also launched weight loss sites, including MyNaturalWeightLossDiet.com, which was pushing colon cleanses and acai supplements, and what appeared to be a series of dating websites, adultfriendgrinder.com and findgeekgirls.com. . .
> While those enterprises failed to get off the ground, he found more success as co-founder of MixRank, a data-driven-marketing startup, which was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program in 2011. . .
> Lichtenstein has not been nearly as prolific on social media as his wife. Over the past decade, his Twitter account was quiet for nearly seven years, from 2013 until 2020. But in January 2021, he complained about what he called “#BigTechCensorship.”
MORE TO THE STORY - There's always more!
A 20-page affidavit written by Christopher Janczewski, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service, accuses Morgan and Lichtenstein of moving the stolen bitcoins “through thousands of transactions to over a dozen accounts” in their own names and businesses. . .
> But it was Lichtenstein’s use of a cloud-storage account that led to the unraveling of the alleged plot. The government decrypted a file there that contained a list of 2,000 virtual currency addresses, along with corresponding private keys. Almost all of those addresses were linked to the Bitfinex heist, according to the Justice Department, . .
UPDATE: During a detention hearing Tuesday before a federal magistrate judge, Morgan and Lichtenstein were ordered released on bond, over prosecutors' objections. The objections included the fact that Morgan allegedly “tried to lock her cellular phone to prevent law enforcement examination” and that the pair “engaged in extraordinarily complex laundering” of some of the bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex. In the end, however, Chief Judge Beryl Howell ordered the husband and wife to remain in custody. A hearing has been scheduled for Friday. . .
> In August 2019, Morgan gave a lecture on “How to Social Engineer Your Way Into Anything” to a group in New York City. When asked by an audience where the line should be drawn in social engineering, Morgan responded: “I do believe that the ends justify the means sometimes,” she said. “My end goals aren’t bad or evil. I’m not trying to scam someone out of money or get someone hurt in any way.”
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