Tech

Woman Who Allegedly Laundered $1B in Bitcoin Was Cringe YouTube Rapper

Heather Morgan, accused of laundering $1 billion in cryptocurrency along with her husband, has a long and dubious history online.
Screen Shot 2022-02-08 at 2
Image: Razzlekhan/YouTube

A woman accused of laundering $1 billion in stolen Bitcoin with her husband was very much online, blogging for Forbes, and posting cringe crypto-themed rap videos on YouTube. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. government accused Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31 of laundering around $1 billion in cryptocurrency stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack. As it turns out, Morgan did not exactly keep the low profile you would expect of an alleged criminal.

Advertisement

As first pointed out by NBC reporter Kevin Collier in a tweet, Morgan has a YouTube channel filled with influencer fare such as a rap video with questionable lyrics, an unboxing video featuring 25 prosthetic eyeballs, and an anti-coronavirus juice recipe. “This song is for the entrepreneurs and hackers, all the misfits and smart slackers,” Morgan sings in the video, as her alter-ego Razzlekhan.

"The infamous Crocodile of Wall Street strikes again!" the Razzlekhan website reads. "More fearless and more shameless than ever before, she's taking on everyone from big software companies to healthcare to finance bros."

“Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what's possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that's certain is it won't be boring or mediocre,” the site reads.

In a TikTok video, part of her fascinating account, Morgan explains how she built a multimillion dollar business at 22 “with zero outside funding,” without mentioning that she and her husband allegedly laundered one billion dollars worth of stolen bitcoins.

“Automate, eliminate, delegate, OK? Repeat after me,” she said in the video.

Do you have any information about Morgan and Lichtenstein? Or do you have information on the Bitfinex hack? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, Wickr/Telegram/Wire @lorenzofb, or email lorenzofb@vice.com

Advertisement

Morgan also used to write for Forbes as a contributor, where she wrote articles about tips to protect your business from cybercriminals, negotiation tactics, and how to become a successful YouTuber. She also has a Twitter account with almost 20,000 followers.

“Heather R. Morgan is an international economist, serial entrepreneur, and investor in B2B software companies. She is an expert in persuasion, social engineering, and game theory,” her bio on the site read. 

Her husband Ilya Lichtenstein was also involved in the crypto world, according to his LinkedIn account, which lists him as a “early stage angel investing in founders and decentralized projects" at a firm called Demandpath. Morgan's LinkedIn page lists her as being a partner at Demandpath. 

According to a a statement of facts published by the feds, Lichtenstein and Morgan claimed that bitcoins held in accounts ostensibly belonging to Demandpath and SalesFolk—a marketing company that Morgan is CEO at—came from early investments, but investigators found that "the primary source of the BTC was the [victim cryptocurrency exchange] accounts that were opened in 2017 after the hack," the statement of facts alleges. 

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER. Subscribe to our new Twitch channel.