Security News > 2022 > February > Self-styled “Crocodile of Wall Street” arrested with husband over Bitcoin megaheist
Split between thousands of bitcoin addresses in cold wallets, some stored in the cloud.
Ultimately, claims the investigation, many of the accounts created and used for shuffling the stolen funds around were traced back to a New York couple who have now been arrested on fraud and money laundering charges: Heather Morgan, 31, and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein, 34.
Submits there is also probable cause to believe that ILYA "DUTCH" LICHTENSTEIN and HEATHER MORGAN violated 18 U.S.C. 371, which makes it a crime in relevant part for two or more persons to conspire to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose, and to do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy.
One fascinating part of this obviously lengthy investigation is that investigators managed to trace data relevant to the case to a cloud storage service account belonging to Lichtenstein.
On January 31, 2022, law enforcement gained access to [the wallet]] by decrypting a file saved to LICHTENSTEIN's cloud storage account, which had been obtained pursuant to a search warrant.
Once the coins were safe, the arrest warrant application went ahead. As you can imagine, law enforcement isn't saying how long it took to crack the encrypted data to recover the bitcoin private keys, or what sort of encryption was used, or how the cracking was done.