Justice Dept. Seizes $3.6 Billion in Bitcoin and Arrests Married

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had seized over $3.6 billion worth of stolen Bitcoin and arrested a married couple accused of laundering the cryptocurrency that hackers had stolen six years ago.

The couple, Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31, were accused in a criminal complaint of conspiring to launder 119,754 Bitcoin that had been stolen in 2016 from Hong Kong-based Bitfinex, one of the world’s largest virtual currency exchanges.

The value of the currency at the time of its seizure last week makes it the department’s largest financial seizure ever, officials said.

A Justice Department official declined to comment on whether Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan had been involved in the hacking itself.

The breach in 2016 was among a spate of hackings into currency exchanges that have allowed for the theft of large amounts of digital currency. Even when the stolen funds were recovered, the thefts underscored the security vulnerabilities in the relatively new world of cryptocurrency. In some cases, the incidents drastically affected cryptocurrency values.

After the hacking of Bitfinex, one of the largest exchanges in the history of the cryptocurrency market, the value of Bitcoin initially plunged about 20 percent.

The arrests on Tuesday “show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “In a futile effort to maintain digital anonymity, the defendants laundered stolen funds through a labyrinth of cryptocurrency transactions.”

Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan appeared in a federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon. A judge ordered them released on bond: $5 million in Mr. Lichtenstein’s case and $3 million in Ms. Morgan’s. A lawyer representing them did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Lichtenstein, who goes by the nickname Dutch, has both American and Russian citizenship and has described himself as a tech entrepreneur, according to the complaint. Ms. Morgan describes herself on her LinkedIn page as “a serial entrepreneur” and an “irreverent comedic rapper.” The complaint, which also charges the couple with conspiracy to defraud the United States, suggests Ms. Morgan also goes by the alias Razzlekhan.

According to court documents, the hacker who breached Bitfinex’s systems initiated 2,000 transactions to send 119,754 stolen Bitcoin to a digital wallet that was under Mr. Lichtenstein’s control.

Over the last five years, about 25,000 of those Bitcoin were transferred out of Mr. Lichtenstein’s wallet using a complicated series of transactions meant to obscure that the currency had been stolen from Bitfinex, the Justice Department said.

But investigators traced the movement of the Bitcoin on the blockchain, the permanent fixed electronic ledger that records each time a Bitcoin moves to a new digital wallet. And some of those funds were eventually deposited into financial accounts controlled by…