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The US Justice Department has seized 94,000 bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex in 2016, currently worth more than $4bn

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Bitfinex stated to use 80% of the net recovered funds to buy back and destroy UNUS SED LEO tokens within 18 months from the date of receipt of the recovered assets.

律动 BlockBeats 消息，2 月 9 日，美国司法部发布公告称，抓获两名犯罪嫌疑人，并查获当前价值超 40 亿美元的比特币，这些加密货币与 2016 年加密交易平台 Bitfinex 被盗有关（被盗加密货币当前价值总计 45 亿美元）。

According to court documents, suspects Ilya Lichtenstein (34) and Heather Morgan (31) allegedly conspired to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex after a hacker broke into Bitfinex's system, And initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions. The unauthorized transactions sent stolen bitcoins to a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein.

Over the past five years, about 25,000 stolen Bitcoins were removed from Lichtenstein's wallet through a complex money-laundering process that ended up depositing some of the stolen funds into financial accounts controlled by the two suspects, Lichtenstein and Morgan. The rest of the stolen money, including more than 94,000 bitcoins, is still in wallets used to receive and store the illegal proceeds of the hack. After executing a court-authorized search warrant for an online account controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, agents obtained documents for an online account controlled by Lichtenstein. The files contained private keys needed to access digital wallets that directly received stolen money from Bitfinex, and allowed agents to legally confiscate and recover more than 94,000 bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex. The recovered bitcoins were worth more than $3.6 billion at the time of seizure. (Pulse note: Bitcoin was trading at around $43,000 at press time, making it worth more than $4 billion.)

Bitfinex also issued a statement saying that it will work with the US Department of Justice and follow appropriate legal procedures to establish the right to return the stolen Bitcoins and will use 80% of the net recovered funds to buy back and destroy UNUS SED LEO tokens within 18 months from the date of receipt of the recovered assets.