One of the most shocking news of the week was the arrest of the businessman Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, the former columnist of Forbes Heather Morganwho had in their possession more than 3 billion dollars in Bitcoin. According to the investigation by the United States Department of Justice, said cryptocurrencies were part of those stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack. that it fell into the hands of one of the great platforms of today; and in this case it is Netflix the one that has stung in tip to portray it.
the streaming service confirmed that is already working on a documentary series which will tell the story behind Lichtenstein and Morgan’s plans to launder the Bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex. Netflix’s announcement does not go into detail about how many chapters this production will have, much less when it will be available. However, as it is one of the hottest topics today, it is clear that they have tried to take advantage of the pull to retain the highest possible level of attention on it.
It has been confirmed that the director will be Chris Smith, who has already worked with Netflix on tiger-king, among other proposals. Smith himself will also executive produce alongside Nick Bilton.
The terse announcement does not mention whether the focus of the documentary series will be solely on the lives of Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein, and how they were linked to the Bitfinex hack and the laundering of billions of dollars in Bitcoin; or if it will also be addressed in greater depth how the theft of that platform was and how the cryptocurrencies were tracked despite the passing of the years.
But, as we mentioned at the beginning, the arrest of the accused has also brought to light some really absurd details about their private lives. The most notorious, without a doubt, is Morgan’s past as a rapper. Under stage name Razzlekhanthe former columnist of Forbes published some songs that we could qualify as hilarious; and while the official videos quickly disappeared from YouTube, they were almost instantly republished by many other accounts. Undoubtedly, Netflix will have plenty of material to entertain itself in putting together the documentary.
Netflix gets to work with the documentary on the Bitfinex case
As we told you in recent days, the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan revolutionized the financial and cryptocurrency world. It is worth noting that it is still unknown who perpetrated the hack in question, but the researchers do managed to link thousands of transactions to accounts on exchange platforms in the name of Lichtensteinas well as wallets whose private keys were also in the possession of the couple.
An interesting aspect to portray in the Netflix documentary will be how the authorities managed to access the virtual wallets with the stolen Bitcoin. It is worth noting that all addresses and passwords were stored in an encrypted document, in a cloud storage service. Without a doubt, it is a striking slip, since any expert in cryptocurrencies would never recommend such a method to store addresses and seed phrases.
During the Bitfinex hack, 119,754 bitcoins were stolen, of which more than 94,000 remained in the hands of Morgan and Lichtenstein. According to the investigators, in the last 5 years the defendants they were able to launder 25,000 BTC through different methods; among them, the purchase of gold and NFTs. The laundered amount is estimated at over one billion dollars, taking into account the evolution of the price of Bitcoin.