Good news everybody – prison terms have dropped to just 12 months for every $1 billion you steal!

Photo above - Hiding in plain sight. Bitcoin hacker Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife "Razzlekhan", a TikTok personality and rapper, pose for posterity before being sentenced.

Ilya Lichtenstein. Remember that name. He’s the guy who stole 120,000 bitcoins. Which were worth $5 billion when he was found guilty. $7 billion today, as Bitcoin keeps soaring under the premise that Donald Trump will relax regulations on crypto currency. Ilya is going to prison for 5 years. 1 year for every billion. Wait . . . it’s not even 5 full years. He was in custody awaiting trial for 2 years 9 months, and gets credit for that. So the actual sentence will be just 2 more years. Unless Ilya gets more time off for good behavior, or the prison is overcrowded or something. See link below.

Who says the American system of justice is too harsh? It’s true that you can go to jail for 20 years just for ATTEMPTED bank robbery, even if you didn’t use a gun, and even if you didn’t make it out the front door with your loot. But 5 years for hacking $5 billion? Hey kids, stay in school, and take coding 101. No need to be selling $10 bags of Dragon’s Breath (Fentanyl) on the street, when a few keystrokes can net you billions.

Where did Ilya learn HIS computer skills? Details are vague. He was born in Russia, but at some point came to Chicago and passed our rigorous citizenship test (“When is Independence Day? Where is the White House?”)

As far as we can tell, Ilya did not pull his heist until AFTER he was fully assimilated.

I sure hope that stealing $5 billion worth of Bitcoin – and successfully “laundering” it – is the only thing Ilya got away with. But I am concerned about his Russian origins, and his PhD in money laundering. We can’t prove it, of course, but it seems there’s a probability greater than zero that Ilya could also involved in laundering drug cartel proceeds, and for, terrorists and Russian arms dealers.

Once he's paid his 2-year debt to society, will Ilya become a model citizen, and live a crime free middle-class life? Return to Moscow? Resume money laundering, but with more precautions? We’ll have to wait and see. But not that long evidently.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Bitcoin hacker sentenced to five years in prison

Top | Newest First | Oldest First

Nibblesnarf · 26-30, M

I remember following this story when the arrests were first announced. It struck a chord, because at some point, I spent time learning the Bitcoin protocol in detail such that I could manually glean info from the blockchain. Now, I wasn't working toward an attempted Bitcoin heist, and Ilya exploited vulnerabilities in a third party exchange (rather than in the Bitcoin protocol itself). But from an amoral standpoint, I still had some appreciation for his handiwork.

Moving around large amounts of Bitcoin and cashing out is difficult to do while staying anonymous. From what I remember, Ilya's fatal error was somewhat amateurish. Maybe it was just a moment of carelessness. Or maybe, in a moment of frustration, he took an easier but slightly less anonymous step in the laundering process, figuring, "Eh, this probably won't come back to bite me."

You raise an interesting question, about whether this was his first/only instance of money laundering. I suspect that it more or less was, but of course we don't really know.

For me, the funniest thing about this saga is definitely his wife. And, yes, I realize she had a lesser role than Ilya did. But I still found it bizarre to look at her and think: she's arguably one of the biggest thieves in human history, but she calls herself "RazzleKhan" and posts videos like this:

[media=https://youtu.be/ncqEZfKLcTs]

The modern world is, in some ways, a very strange place.

Avectoijesuismoi · 31-35

He just relocated the funds elsewhere obviously still a bit of an amateur to actually get found out, the difference with actual physical bank robbery is that there is most likely some from of threatening behaviour and likelihood that some form of violence occurs, however it is a very outdated concept and due the the modern banking methods is now also very likely to be low yield

MethDozer · M

American justice. White collar crime is treated as formality, blue collar crime is treated with iron fists.

Add a comment...