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Cindy Weisgram hasn’t been checking the information a lot recently. Just lately laid off from her job, the Tehama, California native has used the newfound downtime to chill out and take into consideration what she’ll do subsequent.
So when Weisgram, 60, heard that her cousin, Heather Rhiannon Morgan, had been arrested by federal brokers in New York Metropolis on fees of laundering $4.5 billion of stolen Bitcoin, she was—to place it mildly—astonished.
“It by no means appeared like she actually had a traditional day job,” Weisgram, who now lives in Ketchikan, Alaska, advised The Day by day Beast on Wednesday. “At one level, about three years in the past…there was some point out of her being, like, a millionaire… I all the time questioned how she had a lot cash, however rattling.”
Morgan, 31, and her husband Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, 34, stand accused of making an attempt to launder 119,754 Bitcoin purloined from the Bitfinex crypto change in a 2016 hack. The digital foreign money was transferred right into a digital pockets in Lichtenstein’s title, in addition to accounts managed by each, and investigators finally adopted the cash to the couple’s two-bedroom residence on Wall Avenue.
The Bitcoin, price some $71 million on the time of the hack, had elevated in worth to $4.5 billion by the point of the Feb. 8 bust. The feds had been in a position to get their fingers on $3.6 billion of that, making it the biggest monetary seizure in U.S. historical past.
A legal criticism filed in Manhattan federal courtroom lays out the small print of a staggeringly intricate net of cash transfers and pseudonymous accounts, which was finally untangled by particular brokers with the IRS, FBI, and the Division of Homeland Safety.
Morgan, who carried out as a rapper beneath the title “Razzlekhan,” has additionally been a Forbes contributor, writing some 55 columns for the monetary media outlet over the previous a number of years, together with one story printed in June 2020 headlined, “Consultants Share Ideas To Shield Your Enterprise From Cybercriminals.”
Morgan and Lichtenstein’s alleged haul was so enormous that they had been unable to filter all the Bitcoin via the reliable monetary system to make it seem legit, in accordance with the feds. Nonetheless, the criticism towards the pair says they managed to transform “round $2.9 million price” of the illicit Bitcoin to laborious foreign money between 2017 and 2021—sufficient to get pleasure from a really comfy way of life.
“I all the time sort of attributed [the money she had] to that cold-email firm that she all the time talked about, how she made her fortune in that,” recalled Weisgram, a former Coast Guard spouse who serves as a Ketchikan volunteer ambulance dispatcher. “She mentioned she made some huge cash off of her chilly emails, and articles she was writing for newspapers and magazines and such.”
In 2013, Morgan based an organization referred to as SalesFolk, which payments itself as “the primary firm to focus on chilly e-mail copywriting.” The corporate gave the impression to be on the up-and-up, and Morgan printed movies on-line with, amongst different issues, recommendation for individuals making an attempt to interrupt into tech. However prosecutors allege that she and Lichtenstein used the corporate’s accounts to launder the stolen Bitcoin.
“My boyfriend (now husband) gifted me cryptocurrency over a number of years (2014, 2015,), [sic] which have appreciated,” she allegedly wrote in a 2019 e-mail to an unnamed digital foreign money change. “I've been holding them in chilly storage.”
As Razzlekhan, Morgan described her persona as “like Genghis Khan, however with extra pizzazz.”
Her lyrics embody traces about “getting excessive within the cemetery,” the place, she boasts, “I really like me some grave grass.”
“Nobody is aware of for certain the place this rapper’s from—might be the North African desert, the jungles of Vietnam, or one other universe,” her web site says. “All that issues is she’s right here to stay up for misfits and underdogs in all places. (We do know that she’s descended from a nomadic tribe, although!)”
In actuality, Morgan grew up in Tehama, simply down the street from Weisgram’s facet of the household. It’s a sleepy city of lower than 500 individuals, most of whom Weisgram described as “fantastic.”
Weisgram recalled that Morgan had been a really quiet youngster, although one who “might be somewhat snot” at occasions when she performed with Weisgram’s children. Nonetheless, as soon as Morgan left for school on the College of California, Davis, Weisgram mentioned she started to return out of her shell and was not “that shy little lady that I knew.”
“Then she moved to New York and was ‘Gangsta Woman,’” mentioned Weisgram, including that Morgan “cherished to be completely different, she lived to decorate up wild and funky and stroll down the streets of New York Metropolis. She match proper in.”
Whereas in NYC, Morgan additionally tried her hand at improv comedy.
“She was really in my 101,” Matt Dennie, a former teacher on the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, wrote on Twitter after studying of Morgan’s arrest. “No matter you think about it was like, it was… “True story: She did provoke one scene with ‘Welcome to the clinic, did you carry your personal coat hanger?’ Once I stopped it and requested if she was initiating an abortion scene she mentioned sure and that abortion was humorous.”
In certainly one of her Forbes posts, Morgan wrote about her insecurity over a childhood speech obstacle that “prevented me from doing plenty of issues I used to be passionate and inquisitive about once I was youthful, from movie and comedy to management alternatives.”
“However fortunately, I used to be too bizarre and broke too many guidelines to have a traditional job, so I made a decision to be an entrepreneur and begin my very own firm once I was 23,” she wrote.
For an alleged Bitcoin launderer, Morgan didn’t ever appear to say digital foreign money of any form, at the least to Weisgram, who recalled her youthful cousin speaking about searching together with her dad, or touring the world, however “completely nothing” about crypto, she mentioned.
On Wednesday, Lichtenstein posted a $5 million bond, Morgan put up a $3 million bond, and their passports had been seized. Nonetheless, a choose in Washington, D.C., subsequently stepped in and ordered them jailed pending additional assessment. If convicted, Lichtenstein and Morgan face a most of 25 years in jail. Their attorneys, Anirudh Bansal and Sam Enzer, didn't reply to The Day by day Beast’s requests for remark.
The most recent flip in Morgan’s life is “not something like what I do know of Heather,” mentioned Weisgram. “It is like a dream. Did I watch an excessive amount of Legislation & Order and now I’m simply waking up?”