Just over two years ago, she became engaged to Lichtenstein, known as “Dutch”, after he paid for her music to be advertised on electronic billboards in New York’s Times Square. The 34-year-old Russian bills himself as a “technology entrepreneur, coder and investor” and co-founded MixRank, a sales tech firm.
The pair share a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Lower Manhattan’s Wall Street – not far from where Morgan filmed the music video for song ‘Versace Bedouin’ – alongside Clarissa, their Bengal cat.
Now, they have been propelled into the limelight with the story of their alleged money laundering scheme stretching back to 2016, when cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex fell victim to a cyber attack.
An unnamed computer hacker is said to have carried out more than 2,000 unauthorised transactions, looting 119,754 bitcoin from customer wallets, worth about $71m at the time. Since the hack, the value of the stolen funds has ballooned to $4.5bn.
According to American prosecutors, some of this money was then funnelled through a string of other accounts in a complex series of transactions, eventually ending up in accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan.
Prosecutors said they spent it on pre-paid $500 debit cards from Walmart, used to pay for Uber taxis, hotels and a PlayStation video games console.
But they also splashed on more luxury items. Court documents say some of the cash was splurged on gold and “non-fungible tokens” – digital collectables that have become popular in the past year.
Their tactics to disguise the stolen funds and their criminal activities, prosecutors allege, included the use of false names, computer programmes and vast numbers of transactions to make the stolen cash harder to track, multiple exchanges and business accounts.
When questioned about the source of her wealth by one exchange, court documents say Morgan responded: “My boyfriend (now husband) gifted me cryptocurrency over several years (2014, 2015,), [sic] which have appreciated. I have been keeping them in cold storage.”
Bitcoin bonanza
However, after tracking the money, investigators gained access to Lichtenstein’s personal files, stored online in the cloud, which allegedly contained a list of digital wallets and passwords connected to the hack.
This included details for the account involved in the original hack, which still contained around 94,000 bitcoin in January – by that stage worth $3.6bn. While the pair have not been accused of directly carrying out the hack, they have been accused of laundering that sum of money.
The US government said that while the majority of the stolen funds have been seized, there are several other virtual currency addresses the couple are believed to control which hold about 7,506 Bitcoin, valued at more than $328m.
Now, with the funds frozen, the pair were arrested on Tuesday and charged by US law enforcement. The same day, they appeared in a Manhattan court and a judge ordered them to be released on bonds worth $8m in total.
A Washington judge, however, is reconsidering that order after prosecutors claimed there was a risk the pair could flee the country.
