Crocodile of Wall Street

Speaker 1: So before we get to the wrapping, and there is wrapping, before we get to how that rapper allegedly pulled off a multi billion dollar social engineering hack, we're gonna start with a different question, which is how do you pay back the billions in crypto that that rapper allegedly helped steal? Earlier this year, the Department of Justice seized a few billion dollars in stolen crypto from a 2016 heist of the troubled Bitcoin exchange, Bitfinex. Back in 08/02/2016, about a 120,000 Bitcoin then worth a paltry $60,000,000 was stolen. And for the victims of that hack, the DOJ seizing the now $3,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin was, you know, seems like great news. Right? Everyone's gonna get their money back.

Speaker 2: But

Speaker 1: now those victims are wrapped in a new battle, not with the original hackers, but with Bitfinex.

Speaker 3: Is it a rap battle?

Speaker 1: It's a rap battle, Scott. Okay. We're doing rap battles this episode.

Speaker 3: Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I got bars. I got bars, Jordan. Let's go.

Speaker 1: You got bars? You got bars for me, dude? Oh, man. Let's see let's see if you've got these, let's see if your bars rise to the level of the bars in this in this story. In a public statement, Bitfinex has intuitively stated that they want the Department of Justice to give them back these stolen Bitcoins, the specific coins, saying, quote, Bitfinex will work with the DOJ and follow appropriate legal processes to establish our rights to a return of the stolen Bitcoin. But importantly, for those people whose money was stolen, Bitfinex believes they've already paid these customers back. And whether or not you agree with them is tricky because Bitfinex did pay them back in a token that they issued. It was redeemable for money, but whose value tanks immediately after issuing. It's like a very sloppy crypto drama. And now Bitfinex wants those coins. So I do wanna talk with you a little bit about that, about what Bitfinex did in the wake of that hack and whether or not you think those victims were made whole because it's interesting. But we're gonna get to that later. Because here's the thing. You and I don't normally talk about crypto hacks. Right? Because there's just so many of them.

Speaker 3: So many.

Speaker 1: And at a certain point, what's even left to say? If we covered them all, it would eat this show.

Speaker 3: If you mess if you mess with the bull, you get the horns. I think that's what's left to say. And I feel like I feel like there's a lot of people out there that wish that crypto was a bull in the investor sense, but it turns out it's just a wild animal.

Speaker 1: And when I read about this one, I found the nitty gritty details of paying back deceased crypto interesting, but maybe not enough for us to spend a whole episode talking about it. But then I asked the question, if Bitfinex sees the crypto, they must know who the hackers are. Right? Which brought me to the rapping.

Speaker 3: K. A lot. I can't I can't watch anymore of this. My That's

Speaker 1: not that's not you're not into it? It's not going on heavy rotation?

Speaker 3: My musical senses have been offended enough for the week.

Speaker 1: Those bars are brought to you by Heather Morgan, a k a Razzlekhan, who along with her partner, Ilya Lichtenstein, a k a Dutch, have been charged in relation to this hack, This multi billion dollar hack. And this story, the story of Razzlekhan and Dutch is not untold by any means depending on when folks are listening to this. The creators of Tiger King either are going to or already have released what I'm sure is gonna be the next big you know, Netflix doc series about it. There's a scripted version in development over at Hulu. It's it's a whole thing.

Speaker 3: It seems very Tiger King just for the thirty four seconds of this video that I watched.

Speaker 1: Contained in that thirty four seconds is the whole Tiger King.

Speaker 3: I get real strong, you know, Tiger King vibes. I could I could see this being a

Speaker 1: very successful media property. I I think it's gonna do well. And you and I have not talked about it, Scott, so we're gonna I'm taking bets on what these still untitled doc series is going to be called, but I'm gonna put my money on a line from this track of Razzlecons. This is the crocodile of Wall Street here on Hacked.

Speaker 3: It was, like, one of the first lines she said, like, on the crocodile of Wall Street or something, and it's like, I could see crocodile of Wall Street being the line. It's pretty good. If they really they could reach for something like Razzle Dazzle because it's Razzlecon in Dutch, but I'm not sure I'm not sure. But but it's not really Razzle Dazzle. It's Razzle in Dutch, and it's not as cool as the Crocodile Wall Street.

Speaker 1: Crocodile Wall Street's pretty cool. I will say we're we're reaching we're not there yet. I'm probably gonna call this episode that, so we're I'm I'm gonna say we're not there yet, but we're getting close to needing to retire the wolf of Wall Street naming structure. It's becoming our, like, generation's Watergate naming structure where everything just gets shoehorned into that framing.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: I was reading an article today about the wolf of Airbnb, crocodile of Wall Street. It was like, we gotta pump the brakes before this thing gets used up.

Speaker 3: Come on, buddy. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Show a little a little tip, like, discretion.

Speaker 3: Oh, man. This one this one just feels very crypto. You know, we got So it's the most crypto thing I've ever heard. We got the Crocodile of Wall Street who's also, you know, an up and coming rap anthem singer from Misfits, Versace Bedouin. That's the name of the song. Yep. I thought that was Name

Speaker 1: of the song.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's this is just this has just got crypto all over it. Is there is there a

Speaker 1: In every single direction.

Speaker 3: Like, you know the term crypto bro? What is the Mhmm. Female version of that? Is there a female version of that? Is it non gendered?

Speaker 1: That's actually really crypto bro, or is crypto bro? Just like a

Speaker 3: at the heart of nongendered, even though it has the word bro in it. But, like, can you be a can you be a female crypto bro? I'm not sure, but this this has got A

Speaker 1: crypto fissionado? Yeah. A crypto And Yeah. I don't know. It it's so synonymous with the crypto bro.

Speaker 3: Exactly. I think I

Speaker 1: think anyone can be a crypto bro. I think it's like a an essence. It's a quality. It's like a a steadfast sureness in the face of a line going up and down. No matter what that line's doing, you just know in your bones.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I think that's the essence of it. You know?

Speaker 3: I feel like Rosalcon, you know, aka huddlegang chief, aka I don't know. But the, I feel like she seems like she's got some hardcore crypto bro energy.

Speaker 1: I would agree with that.

Speaker 3: CBE, Crypto bro energy? Is that a thing? Should be a thing.

Speaker 1: Crypto bro yeah. Crypto CBE. She's got big CBE. Anyway So the crypto trial of the century is set for, I believe, March 2023. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know if they'll actually be convicted of the charges that are laid against them. So I'm gonna put that over here. And though the wrapping is pretty cringe, I don't think it's necessarily what's most interesting about this. What's most interesting about this is, assuming these are the people behind this, is what happens when technological prowess and social engineering prowess meet, not in one person, but in a couple. Two people, one with each skill kind of coming together with allegedly

Speaker 3: pretty extraordinary results. Isn't isn't that the recipe for this podcast, Jordan?

Speaker 1: Which one of us is Razzlekhan?

Speaker 3: I don't know. You tell me.

Speaker 1: There's no there's no good. There's no there's none that I wanna be. Let's start with who and what Bitfinex is. Let's just lay the groundwork here. What is your sense of Bitcoin exchanges, Scott? Do you have a preferred one?

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My preferred one is is to stay as far away from all of them as possible and stay in real exchanges with regulations and oversight. But, you know Sure. That's a crazy concept these days. Yeah. That's no fun. Yeah. I don't even know who the big players are. I feel like there's, like I see them on f one cars, crypto.com, FTX. Didn't is it FTX? FTX said that they were gonna buy Coinbase or, like, we're thinking about buying Coinbase, which is, you know, great. Coinbase, probably another big one. Trying to think of the ones that are publicly traded.

Speaker 1: Coinbase is the one that comes to mind for me. There was sort of this one magical summer when crypto exchanges and legalized gambling ads hit hard where we live. If you watched any kind of live television, you were you were getting those in spades. They all had celebrity endorsers. It was a real fun time.

Speaker 3: It's funny enough. They're the exact same product.

Speaker 1: The Bitcoin exchanges, very broadly speaking, have one job to do, which is to keep users' cryptocurrency and cash safe and secure. They are historically not very good at this at all. The first big one was called Mount Gox. Have you heard of it?

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Famous. You know Famous. About Mount Gox? Yeah. He disappeared. Right? The founder. And, like, I can't remember how many hundreds of millions of dollars, but I don't has he has he ever been seen again? I'm I'm trying to remember if I can remember the details of this, but I'm I'm pretty sure that that person disappeared and took all the money and left and was never seen again.

Speaker 1: So so Mount Gox Mount Gox took the money and ran in the old school way, which was filing bankruptcy, actually. Oh. But there is a chance you might have heard of Mt. Gox not because of your obvious love for decentralized finance, but because of your love of Magic the Gathering.

Speaker 3: Oh, I do I do love Magic the Gathering for everybody listening, just so you know. Big fan.

Speaker 1: Mt. Gox originally stood for, Magic the Gathering online exchange. And it stood for that because Mt. Gox, the cryptocurrency exchange, is a repurposed website for trading Magic cards like stocks. And when they pivoted, they quite cleverly said, we already own this URL, Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, m t g o x. They didn't wanna buy a new URL, so they just put kind of an implied period between MT and Gox, and Magic the Gathering online exchange became Mount Gox. That is arguably the most clever part of their operation.

Speaker 3: They just couldn't handle giving up the SEO. You know?

Speaker 1: They put so much work into it. You know?

Speaker 3: All of that all of that earned view ease views over the years, they just couldn't get couldn't give it up. I understand. Yeah.

Speaker 1: All that brand equity. I get it.

Speaker 3: I get it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in 2014. At the time, it had, through the countless times it was hacked since its inception, lost single handedly 7% of all Bitcoins in existence. Wow. We could spend this entire episode talking about hacked crypto exchanges, but that would be boring. So we're just gonna spend, like, twenty seconds just to establish a pattern here. Coin check, was taken for 530,000,000 in 2018. KuCoin for 280,000,000 in 2020. Last year alone, 3,200,000,000 in cryptocurrency was stolen from exchanges specifically, which would make it, according to an LA Times article, 100 times more than all of the money stolen in every bank robbery in The United States added together.

Speaker 3: Yep. Great

Speaker 1: place to steal money.

Speaker 3: Great place to store your wealth.

Speaker 1: Bringing us to Bitfinex. When it was hacked, Bitfinex was actually considered to be pretty legitimate, like pretty safe. The story of its development and creation is one that's probably gonna be pretty familiar to script kitty types everywhere. It was, copy and pasted code from a different exchange called Bitcoinica. Grabbed that code, pop it somewhere else instead. Let's go call it Bitfinex. That operation was then invested in and run by a multi hyphenate plastic surgeon slash electronics importer named Giancarlo Devasini. Devasini invested in Bitfinex in 2012 and basically became the boss of the operation. He is and this is sort of just trivia, but he's also the boss. I don't know if he's creator or chief big investor, but he's the man behind something called Tether. Oh, yeah. You heard of Tether?

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. As as as much as you can tell that I love crypto by the tone of my voice, I I I do stay relatively up on it as I find it very fascinating.

Speaker 1: It's almost more fascinating if you aren't actively participating in it because you don't have any I'm not gonna say bias, but you don't have any reason to root for it or again you can kinda just watch it all unfold Exactly. As it always is.

Speaker 3: It's it's it's a very, very dynamic and well written drama show that I watch.

Speaker 1: I think judging by the number of things that are in develop in the development pipeline, it is also probably going to be a bunch of, literally written drama shows over the next coming years. Absolutely. But I digress. Tether, Giancarlo Deficini's other large crypto project, is a stablecoin that is supposed to be backed one to one with the US dollar, but has been fined by US regulators for lying about the $67,000,000,000 in assets that they would have needed to have to make that true. A fact that we will consider foreshadowing. So, let's get into the hack itself. Bitfinex had set up this new security system after it lost about $400,000 in a different crypto hack a few years ago. The way most other exchanges at the time worked was something called cold storage. Generally, they would mix users coins together and store their private keys on computers that weren't connected to the internet. Bitfinex, alternatively, used something, a piece of software from a San Francisco based company, a piece of software called BitGo. And their new system that was supposed to keep Bitfinex secure and make it the safest place to store your crypto, was that each user's balance was kept on a separate address on the blockchain allowing customers to actually see where on the chain their money wise. On the security side of things, to keep things fast, BitGo was programmed to automatically approve transfers underneath a certain limit. To do a big transfer, the kind of transfer someone might do in a hack, it required a Bitfinex executive to manually sign off. The idea here is if Bitfinex did get hacked, the thieves wouldn't be able to steal more than a little bit of crypto. So far so good. But in what would prove to be kind of the big vulnerability, that threshold that distinguishes a small automatic transaction from one requiring that executive approval, that limit could be changed with a command sent by someone with executive electronic credentials. Beautiful. It's incredible. Though we don't know the exact social engineering tactic used, the hackers were able to get a remote access Trojan, which we've talked about, onto the computers of someone on the Bitfinex executive team. Remote access trojan, for anyone who doesn't know, essentially lets you operate an infected computer as though you're sitting at

Speaker 3: it.

Speaker 1: With those credentials, they were able to do two important things. First, they got access to all the private keys, the cryptographic passwords that would allow them to unlock the coins and move them. But, the coins were still trapped inside the system because of that threshold. But, with this access, they were able to change the automatic transfer limit that distinguished, you know, a transaction that needed approval versus one that didn't. And then they got to work draining this whole thing.

Speaker 3: I love that the main barrier was, like, changing a value in an INI file. 100%. You know, like, you know, you know, the config file says that the limit is, like, you know, 10,000 USD, but let's just change it to, like, a billion USD and forget that it exists.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You build all of this security infrastructure, but you want it to be easy to use for your real customers who are these executives. And as long as that's the case, all of that security is only as good as the security of the individuals with easy access.

Speaker 3: Hey. We've said it before on the show. You know, convenience is the is the counterpart. You know, it is the the reason for insecurity lots of the times. Every every step you take towards convenience, you take a step away from secure. So

Speaker 1: And at 10:26AM on 08/02/2016, we got to see that, play out at a pretty incredible scale. At that moment, the hackers cranked up the exchange's daily withdrawal limit from 2,500 Bitcoin to a million, which was enough to basically drain the whole site. And then using those private keys they had, they transferred Bitfinex's Bitcoins to addresses that they controlled on the blockchain. And over the three hours and fifty one minutes that followed, the hackers stole about a 120,000 Bitcoins. Wow. More than half of the holdings in what was then one of the largest, you know, crypto exchanges in the world. This drain only gets plugged when someone at Bitfinex, someone else, happens to check the account balances, notices that half of the company's holdings are gone, and throws an alarm. Site goes into lockdown. Everything shuts down, but the hackers are already gone. If you were fleeing the scene of a hack heist thing like this, on your way out, what would you do, Scott?

Speaker 3: RM slash RF, you know, route and just delete everything. Be like, see you guys. Later. Format hard drives and move on.

Speaker 1: That's exactly what they did. Hackers erased the server's memory on their way out, wiping out pretty much any indication of who they were or where they went, leaving them shaped hole where all that crypto used to be.

Speaker 3: Just to talk about that, like, I I'm not sure what the dates were here, but at today's valuation, which is

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 3: Quote, unquote low for what, what we've seen in the last, like, sixteen months. Yeah. Sure. That's 2.4 a 120,000 Bitcoin is around 2,400,000,000, 2,500,000,000 USD. Yeah. That's a that's a sizable heist. You know?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Some might say it's the single largest heist ever recorded.

Speaker 3: Like, famous Hollywood heist. Like, what was the heist value of Ocean's 11? I wanna say it was, like, a 140,000,000 or something like that.

Speaker 1: It just seems so paltry now.

Speaker 3: It's like these 160,000,000 was the the planned heist heist value versus 2,400,000,000 and literally, like, you didn't have to leave your keyboard.

Speaker 1: Well, and if you sold it at the right time, which they did not

Speaker 3: Of course.

Speaker 1: But if you had sold it at the peak Oh my god. I've been saying 3,000,000,000. I think right now, it's at 2.4. At its peak, it was $8,000,000,000, which, I wasn't being facetious. That would literally make it the biggest recorded heist of any kind ever. Like, the most money stolen in one go.

Speaker 3: Well, I'm just trying to think what companies on, like, the Nasdaq have a have a have a market capitalization less than $8,000,000,000. There's gotta be a few.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. Did you steal a Skechers?

Speaker 3: You could buy a publicly traded, like, massive company for less than that. Like, what's GME's? Let's talk about meme meme stocks to go along with our meme coins.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. Let's get meme stock.

Speaker 3: The, yeah. So GameStop Corporation's market capitalization as of recording, and it's up 10% today Sure. Which is shocking, is 8,600,000,000. So literally, these people stole GameStop. Incredible. We know we could just spend, like, all day looking up company valuations that they they could've they could've, like, converted their Bitcoin into and bought, like, these massive companies that we all know.

Speaker 1: I mean, we could just spend all day doing that, and it would be a pretty fun way to spend a day. My god. I'm not gonna do this, but I'm I'm looking at some companies that are evaluated at around they stole one password. They stole they stole all of the company one password. They stole a vice media and a half. Really? Elon Musk's boring company, they stole that with plenty of change left over.

Speaker 3: Mhmm. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: If they had liquidated it at the top of its value Yeah. I'm just looking for ones that I recognize because there's, like I don't know what Konta is, but they're worth 5,000,000,000, I guess.

Speaker 3: Snapchat's 16,000,000,000. So half of Snapchat. Half of Snapchat.

Speaker 1: They would have overpaid.

Speaker 3: The, yeah. Well, what did what did Elon just pay for Twitter? 45,000,000?

Speaker 1: 40, yeah, 44, something like that. Oh, FalconX?

Speaker 3: Oh, sorry. $40.40 45,000,000,000. Sorry. Not million.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You got a deal. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I got a great deal.

Speaker 1: The only information that Bitfinex had was the 34 character, like, addresses on the blockchain where the hackers sent all of that stolen money. And Bitfinex posted those addresses on Reddit for everyone in the world to see, try and get more eyes on it. For years, those coins just sat there. And in the years following 2016, as we have said, the value goes absolutely crazy. But the coins couldn't really go anywhere. They could just become worth more and more in value, which for the hackers, there's really nothing to be done about it. Because the trouble with stealing crypto as with stealing money is like, well, how do you spend it? And with real money, you can, like, I don't know, open a bunch of laundromats and try and, like, just sort of start laundering that money type thing. But with crypto, it's it's visible. It's on the blockchain. Everyone can see where it goes. And now that those addresses were being very, very closely watched, there aren't many people in the world who would accept any kind of payment from those implied addresses. Not many people, but not nobody, which brings us to AlphaBay. AlphaBay is a dark web market. We've talked about them on the show before, kind of place where you can buy drugs, stolen credit cards, where you can get scammed trying to hire an assassin. We got a whole episode about that. And on its website, AlphaBay said that it wanted to be the largest eBay style underworld marketplace. On January 2017, about $22,000 worth of the hacked Bitcoins from those addresses were moved over to AlphaBay

Speaker 4: in a bunch of teeny tiny little transactions. And all the Bitcoins that

Speaker 1: are getting sent to AlphaBay are then mixed Bitcoins that are getting sent to AlphaBay are then mixed together, making them harder harder to connect to wherever they'd come from and then could be sent off to some new address. Essentially, AlphaBay was acting as like a a laundering service, sort of a Bitcoin tumbler. Sure. Meaning that if a user withdrew their funds from a new address, their Bitcoins could be traced only as far back as AlphaBay. And while the big exchanges are unwilling to accept Bitcoins that had come from, addresses associated from the hack, some of the smaller exchanges would take coins that came from, accounts associated with a dark web drug drug den. It's just a little bit easier to get that money back out. So the the crypto goes into AlphaBay, and then those hacked Bitcoins kind of freshly cleaned get starts starts getting sent off to different crypto exchanges. Makes sense so far?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I know there's, like, a whole industry of crypto laundry, like mixing services or tumblers, I think they're called. Yep. I don't

Speaker 1: know. AlphaBay was acting as one of those.

Speaker 3: Gotcha. So they were taking payments and then tumbling them and then passing them out to the people who on the other side of the transaction, I'm assuming?

Speaker 1: Exactly. And they get sent off to some crypto exchange that would accept the payment from AlphaBay where they could then get sent off to some increasingly, you know, legitimate crypto exchange. What it looks like was happening was the hackers were trying to figure out a pipeline for laundering all this money.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Like, if I if I wanted like, that's the classic. Like, you know, I open a a laundromat or a nail salon or a cash business, and I, you know, book more revenue than I actually made and, like, use that cash as part of that revenue to clean it and launder it for myself. I'm assuming whoever sold the money set up accounts on AlphaBay and then sold to themselves just to launder the money out the back door. Exactly. Smart. Bingo.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But not perfect. Because say this person is trying to get the the laundered crypto out of AlphaBay into a legitimate exchange. Even if they bounce it around a couple times, the end goal is to get it somewhere where they can actually use it and presumably live off it. Wherever that sequence ends, the legitimate exchange on the far receiving end, to be legitimate would need their real name and information for tax purposes. That's where this all terminates, basically.

Speaker 3: Just gonna make a prediction Yeah. That their greed Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Is

Speaker 3: what's gonna is what costs them here. I'm assuming they tried to get all of the money or most of it to themselves. Where, like, to me, the real mixing service is is you buy everything from everybody on AlphaBay with this money, and you get yourself out a few 100,000,000 in in instead of being like, I'm gonna transfer all 8,000,000,000 to myself and then try and move that out. Like, of course, they're gonna see that. But if you if you tumble it just giving it out to everybody, then how are they ever gonna there's gonna be no way to trace it back to you. Or, like, what not no way, but, like, very substantially less significant ways to trace it back to you. Yeah. So I'm assuming greed greed is what gets them here. But so prove me wrong or prove me right.

Speaker 1: There would be one way. There would be one way with even a tiny little transaction, you could work it back. It's just extraordinarily convoluted and difficult.

Speaker 3: If you paid it out to hundreds of vendors, there would be nothing suspicious about any one of those single vendors Mhmm. Unless you made it suspicious. Like, if you gave $100 to 700 vendors and then 7,000,000,000 to one vendor, obviously, that's you. But, like, if you were to try and take out maybe you pick 50 vendors and you give all 8,000,000,000 to 50 people knowing that you're only gonna get Yeah.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sure.

Speaker 3: Gonna get one fiftieth of it, but at least you're gonna get some of it. Yeah. You would.

Speaker 1: But to even build out that system, you gotta do this little test. Right? This little teeny tiny $22,000 test where you send some money to AlphaBay, and then AlphaBay tumbles it and sends it off to some new address. And even if you bounce it around, you need to just make sure that that works. Right? Of of course. Of course. Before you could do any of these other plans. But what that means is that AlphaBay knows where the crypto came from, which is the stolen addresses, and it knows where it's sent off to, which means that AlphaBay doesn't know who you are, but they know where those, illegitimate coins ended up in a presumably legitimate address Of course. That you had to sign up for using your real identity to make it legitimate. AlphaBay doesn't know who you are. They only know where it's sent. But in that, between the legitimate exchange knowing who you are and AlphaBay knowing what legitimate address it was sent to, there theoretically is a vulnerability. Someone with enough time and resources could connect that account to you using a court order, and then all they would have to do is, I don't know, do a raid on the complex in Thailand where the guy who runs AlphaBay lives, get his computer, and figure out your identity. Hypothetically. Hypothetically. This is a very hypothetical vulnerability that's contingent on the person, username alpha o two, who runs AlphaBay, you know, getting

Speaker 3: caught. Let's just hang there for a second. You're alpha o two. You know? Put yourself in this person's shoes. Yeah. You you own a a CD darknet marketplace

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 3: That has replaced previous CD darknet The CD market. Places when they've been shut down.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: What do you do if somebody transfers $8,000,000,000 worth of crypto into your account?

Speaker 1: Fun question.

Speaker 3: I I I I assume you just steal steal it because everybody else is doing it, so why wouldn't you do it?

Speaker 1: Yeah. What do you care about repeat business when someone just sent you 8,000,000,000 anything? Like, I don't need to come back to this. I don't need anything ever again. I have $8,000,000,000.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Alpha AlphaBay is down. Goodbye. Best of luck in the future.

Speaker 1: Have fun. I'm responding to a new country. Exactly. We have no evidence that 8,000,000,000 was ever transferred. This all hinges on the $22,000 test that was run. Right. Because if you're following the money on the blockchain, you can see it go into AlphaBay, and you go, well, AlphaBay need must know where that goes next. So if we're trying to follow it, that's the next breadcrumb. The breadcrumb's name is alpha o two, a 25 year old Canadian named Alexander Casas. And Alexander had moved to Thailand and bought, in I don't know what order, a bunch of houses, a Lamborghini, and a Porsche with all of his dark web profits. Not the most original, but on some early messages, way back when you started AlphaBay, use an email address years and years prior. Pimp_Alex_91@Hotmail.com. Beauty. Beauty. Tragically, Pimp Alex ninety one had also used his real name when signing up for that email address. So on 07/05/2017, the investigators kicked off operation Bayonet. The Royal Thai police drove a car through the front of the gate of the giant compound in Bangkok where Casas was living. He was lured outside by the sound of a car crashing through his house. And while the cops grabbed him, agents inside found a laptop, which was open and logged into his admin portal on AlphaBay. That back end contained the addresses where he had sent the Bitfinex hackers laundered funds, which was run by a legitimate crypto exchange, which meant that the identity of the hacker, allegedly, was now just a court order away. And so this sort of unfolded over years and years and years. On 01/05/2022, federal agents entered the apartment at 75 Wall Street belonging to a rap mogul slash entrepreneur slash proclaimed social engineering expert and her ad detect turned angel investor partner, Rausil Khan in Dutch.

Speaker 3: You mean the crocodile of Wall Street?

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Speaker 3: Razzle dazzle. Own Dutch.

Speaker 1: Ilya Dutch, Liechtenstein, and Heather Rosalcon Morgan. Let's get into these folks. Morgan, 31 at the time, was the founder of a small kinda little company called Sales Folk. It was a copywriting business. She was living with Lichtenstein in a $6,500 a month apartment on Wall Street, big, nice, beautiful high rise. She wrote a column for Forbes in which her author bio read, when she's not reverse engineering black markets to think of better ways to combat fraud and cybercrime, she enjoys rapping and designing streetwear fashion. Wow. And then there's Ilya. Born in Russia, he'd grown up in Chicago, where his parents had moved when he was a kid. I don't know if we can say he ends up in crypto, but he ends up implied in all of this story. Do you wanna take a wild guess at how he made his fortune? Malware? Lateral. While he was at the University of Wisconsin, he discovered a very cool process called affiliate marketing. Oh, lovely. Yeah. Which is where people buy, you know, just a ton of ads in bulk on Facebook and Google, and they put together some incredible, iconic creative for things like diet pills and offshore gambling sites and pills to make your brain work better.

Speaker 3: That's the that's the that's the other way of doing it now. The way of doing it is

Speaker 1: It's the old school.

Speaker 3: Fabricating reviews and fabricating content around it and then driving those to Yeah. Paid, affiliate links, which is why you just essentially can't trust anything on the Internet anymore as everybody's just trying to get some

Speaker 1: Yeah. Percentage of whatever you're buying. Put your your your coins into the, the Facebook ad, like, I don't know, casino machine and see if you can churn out a little bit of profit, drop shipping socks or some shit. Exactly. Lichtenstein claimed in some posts on forums over the years that he'd made a, you know, $100,000 a year doing this when he was a student. He took that money, and he goes on to found a, to co found an ad tech company that obviously went pretty well because he left it right around 2016 to become a, quote, angel investor. Keen eared listeners would note that he left that endeavor in 2016, which is right around the time, some other stuff happens, bringing us back to the arrest. 01/05/2022, those IRS agents burst into that apartment, on 75 Wall Street. The agents are, like, rummaging around looking for phones, computers. Morgan and Lichtenstein said that they wanted a they weren't under arrest. They wanted to leave the apartment. This was all stressing out their cat. At which point, Morgan, Brazel Khan herself, Versace Bedouin, decides to create a distraction. She says that the cat is hiding under the bed, and she sort of, like, gets down there, crouches down, reaches under the bed to get the cat. While she's down there, she she reaches up and grabs the phone off the nightstand and starts frantically hitting the lock button. One of the agents rips it out of her hand, and they grab her. And then they look under the bed. They find a plastic bin. You wanna guess what was inside that plastic bin?

Speaker 3: Not a cat?

Speaker 1: In no particular order, a ziplock bag labeled burner phone, a red and white striped toiletries bag holding nine more burner phones, four hardware wallets, little, like, thumb drives

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And a pocketbook with $40,000 in cash. Nice.

Speaker 3: Like her go bag?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Her go bag, essentially. I don't do crimes, but I even like the idea of having a go bag.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I don't begrudge someone for having one of those. Over in Liechtenstein's office, they found two books that had been, like, this is old school, hollowed out to create, like, a a little secret chamber cavity type thing. Beautiful. It contained, I think, a couple more of those little little thumb drives. Hardware wallets. But while this is all going on, yep, Morgan and Lichtenstein had, a brief conversation in Russian, which, Morgan had been learning. None of the agents spoke Russian. We will never know what was said between the two of them. But after that initial search of their electronic devices, the agents hadn't found the private keys to all those stolen Bitcoins. So while a bag of burner phones and hardware wallets while this is all incredibly incriminating, it is not enough to arrest someone. It's not illegal to have a go bag. So they leave. Five days after that search, Morgan puts out a new song. It's called Moon and Stars.

Speaker 4: God. Moon and stars to cool for Mars.

Speaker 1: Kind of spooky organs and kind of it's a bop. Maybe we'll play it in the background here. And in the song, she kinda just raps about her relationship with Liechtenstein. It's quite complimentary. But she says a couple lines in it that are pretty interesting. Talks about not wanting to have a regular job. Talks about taking risks to feel alive. Talks about, how you should never forget an exit plan. She says she's gonna be with Lichtenstein until the end. She puts out that song. The agents has also gotten warrants to search Lichtenstein's cloud storage account. And in one of those, they found, well, they found a bunch of stuff. They found a bunch of fake IDs, both male and female. They found notes kinda suggesting that the couple had traveled to Kyiv in 2019 to buy debit cards under some pseudonyms. It really started to look to the agents as though, Rauzel Khan and Dutch had been sort of getting ready for that that exit plan that she's rapping about in that song.

Speaker 3: The Go Bag Day.

Speaker 1: The Go Bag Day. On January 31, they managed to bust through the encryption on one of Lichtenstein's files, and they find the smoking gun. The private keys to nearly 2,000 Bitcoin addresses tied to the original Bitfinex hack. A discovery in his cloud files, at the time, $3,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. The same coin is stolen in the past.

Speaker 3: That's a that's a hard day.

Speaker 1: That's a hard day for old Duchy.

Speaker 3: When the FBI finally cracks the encryption, your passcode on something, and finds out that you've got $3,000,000,000 rotting in a in a Yeah. On the blockchain.

Speaker 1: Must have been, like, that must have been a weird week. Because on one hand, you've been raided by the depart like, by the FBI, but on the other hand, they couldn't find anything. And you're kinda just wondering if the encryption's gonna hold at that point.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: We don't really know how they busted it open, but you gotta wonder if they're sitting there thinking maybe we're gonna get away with this. Maybe the spotlight will be off us long enough that we can get on a plane and and pull off this escape plan that we've cooked up. You're probably pretty hopeful in that week.

Speaker 3: I I assume I assume the second the FBI comes through the door Sure. Even though they don't have enough to arrest you in that moment Yeah. It's go bag time. Like, if if It's go bag time. Like, I wouldn't even I don't I don't even know why you'd stay a week. Like, it would be and release another song. Like, it seems like you should just be go bagging. You know? Always be go bagging. Always always always be go bagging. Always be closing, a b c. Yeah. Exactly. Always be go bagging. Yeah. A b g b.

Speaker 1: I'm pretty shocked. And we'll get back to the story, but, like, I'm pretty floored that by 2022, they hadn't left. There was such a big window of time when they were and we'll learn a little bit more about what they did to, like, allegedly prepare this escape hatch. But it took a really long time, you know, planning their exit. Like, four four years, I think, it might count. Wow. It's just not how you go bag, man.

Speaker 3: You you need to be ready to go bag. What's the what's the TV show where the guy go bags and he, like, punches a wall in, like, his office and pull

Speaker 1: This is my favorite clip.

Speaker 3: And pulls a go bag.

Speaker 1: That's Parks and Recreation.

Speaker 3: Yeah. That's what it was.

Speaker 1: You just Everyone go watch that.

Speaker 3: We shall yeah. We should definitely that's a great clip. Just, like, walks into a room, punches a hole in the wall, pulls a bag out, and, like, runs out or something.

Speaker 1: I think the full context is someone tells him his ex wife is coming. He sprints out of his chair, rips a doorknob off, uses it to punch he punches a hole in the wall with the doorknob so he can stand on it, reaches up, punches a hole, grabs the go bag out of a thing, and then sprints off down the hallway. And I I don't know if it's like a one shot or it just happens really fast.

Speaker 3: Yes. But it is That that that scene, go watch that scene. Parks and Rec. Go watch it. It's worth it.

Speaker 1: And if you're ever stealing somewhere between 60,000,000 and $8,000,000,000 on cryptocurrency, have that bag ready to go day one. Just have it ready. Have it have it sitting by the door. Oh my god. We got the money. Book it. Like, just be ready. Yeah. Exactly. Maybe not the same day, but within the calendar year. I get not wanting to be on a plane the day after a giant heist, but come on. Four or five years, this is your dawdling. It's it's it's called a go bag, not a slow

Speaker 3: bag. Good. Good. Good. Good.

Speaker 1: A week later with the smoking gun in hand, the agents return to the couple's apartment, and they arrest them. Lincolnstown and Morgan are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. And I found this really interesting. The charge actually has to do with the fact that they lied to the exchanges to move the funds. The the the charges regarding the actual hack couldn't be haven't been proven yet because the data was deleted on the way out. It might never actually be. They did commit money laundering, allegedly, and that's what they've been charged with.

Speaker 3: It's a pretty that's a pretty mild charge to take when you've stolen when you're when you're single handedly the largest heister in the world, and all you get it's like it's like, all the all the organized crime guys that get taken down for, like, tax evasion. I feel like this is the equivalent of that. A 100%.

Speaker 1: It's like, hey.

Speaker 3: You stole $8,000,000,000, but, like, you're going to jail because you, like, you know, cleaned cleaned it.

Speaker 1: You lied to this, imaginary cyber bucks bank totally. Exactly. The arrest was national news. It was, I think, in addition to being what I I think the largest hack heist ever, it was also the largest seizure of stolen funds. Both Lichtenstein, and Morgan have pleaded not guilty. Lichtenstein held without bail, and Morgan was released on a $3,000,000 bond. To date, a fifth of that missing Bitcoin is still unaccounted for. But is a funny little addendum. Roughly, $70,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency from those those accounts that had all the stolen funds was sent to something called hydro market, which is a Russian dark website. And while no one knows where the money went from there, this is a fun little piece of trivia about the Russian dark website Hydra. There's a type of vendor called Treasure Men who offer to exchange crypto for shrink wrapped packets of rubles that they then bury in some secret location. And it's really fun to imagine little shrink wrapped bundles of cash buried all over Russia, just waiting for Russel Khan and Dutch to dig them up.

Speaker 3: I like that. That's that's go bag territory right there.

Speaker 1: That's the real go bag shit right there. That's what I wanna hear about. We hired someone on the dark web to bury rubles in the Russian countryside, and we have the GPS coordinates. I'm like, yes. That's what I'm looking for.

Speaker 3: Well, that's, like, that's straight out of, who's the big Colombian drug kingpin? Didn't he have money buried, and they still think there's, like, billions of dollars, like, buried in, like, rubber tubs all over Colombia? Like, that's the that's the move. That's the move. You know?

Speaker 1: That's the real move. Yeah. Burying your wealth in the woods is timeless. So that brings us to today, to the much kind of, less wacky set of questions that now faces the victims in all of this, the exchange, and the people whose Bitcoins were actually stolen. Now that the department of justice has gotten back control of all these coins, what happens to them? So when this initially happened, Bitfinex was panicking because half of all the wealth on their platform had been drained out. But it's also 2016, which is, like, truly the wild west of all this stuff. So they start making some very strange wild calls. They decide to just say, every user on our platform lost 36% of their holdings. They sort of generalized the losses across the entire user base. So some folks probably had more hacked. Some folks had less hacked. They just set everyone 36%. To make everybody whole according to them, they decided to issue a token. They created something called the BFX token, and customers got one BFX token for every dollar that they had lost dollars in the value of the Bitcoin at the time of the heist. The idea is you could sell the BFX token that they'd issue you for a buck. One issue that customers brought up to CNBC is that when they decided to sell those tokens that were supposed to be worth a dollar, immediately following their issuance, their value plunged to pennies on the dollar.

Speaker 3: My brain plunged to nothing.

Speaker 1: Quote, they pegged them to $1 for BFX token, a user named Kavatsos said. And they put them on the open market, and the value plunged from a dollar to, like, 20¢. And they were, I love how he puts this, essentially allowed to FOMO everyone out of their debt.

Speaker 3: Well, the the reality is is to have a functional market, you need supply and demand. And to when you create a a random token to essentially pay off nothing, you you invent a way to pay off something and claim it has a value and then hand it out to a bunch of people who were out billions of dollars, what what other what other thing they're all gonna sell them at the exact same time. And if there's no demand to buy them because this token is Exactly. Well, I guess there's a million useless tokens, and people tend to buy those. So maybe somebody would buy it. Maybe that's why it didn't go to completely valueless. But the but but yeah. It's it's like you see this with companies when, like, a new company gets acquired or something and all of the existing staff stock options mature at the same point. Those maturity deadlines, you see the selling volume go way up because all of these people are liquidating the capital that they've

Speaker 1: been Sure.

Speaker 3: Kind of accruing and unable to sell. So the the same thing that would happen here, everybody's given billions of dollars in, you know, tokens. Lots of air quoting going on on my side of the phone. Yeah.

Speaker 1: A lot of air quoting.

Speaker 3: But, what what else are they gonna do besides sell them and move them into tokens and and assets that they perceive to have value because this new token doesn't really have a basis of value besides what they've just declared it to be? So Yeah. Anyway, the economics of of of light fraud.

Speaker 1: I obviously owe you millions of dollars personally, Scott, my many debts to you. I would like to I don't have those dollars, though. I would like to give you Jordan bucks. K. New currency I have made just now. Mhmm. And I'm writing you a check for the many millions of dollars I owe you in Jordan bucks.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I've declared that Jordan bucks are worth Jordan bucks are worth exactly you know, one Jordan buck is worth exactly 1 US dollar right now.

Speaker 1: Precisely.

Speaker 3: Guarantee nothing in the future.

Speaker 1: I've they're now and I just gave them to you. And whatever happens from this point forward, say their value plunging immediately, is is simply not my case. Buyer beware. I have made you whole. I

Speaker 3: didn't buy these.

Speaker 1: You gave them to me after my shit was stolen.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I wanna hear the I gotta hear the wrap up of this because it's gonna make my stomach hurt.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I know. It's all bad. Rafael Bialenia, who had 91, Bitcoins on the platform at the time of the heist, said, quote, I sold those tokens as fast as possible and immediately when they became available, and I only got about 25% of their their, original value. There was no point in time that they refunded me, not in dollar terms and not in Bitcoin terms. So a little bit of time passes, and for everyone that didn't sell those tokens for pennies on the dollar as fast as humanly possible, The company later gave a new token that they made called BFX, which was the chance to convert those BFX tokens into equity shares of iFinex, the corporate entity that owned Bitfinex, using a a third and fourth token they also created called RRT and Leo. So I think that puts us at they issued five tokens, none of which represented the dollar value of the original cryptocurrency.

Speaker 3: This is just a tear down of the entire crypto space because you're just showing that these tokens take nothing to create, and the only value they have is perceived value.

Speaker 1: The wild part, Scott, is I didn't even set out to do that. I wanted it to be a fun story about a rapping heist, but you just you keep bumping into the and you're like, and then they did what? Then what did they do? And that was this goddamn it. Like, it's you you can't escape it. Bitfinex feels that customers have already been, you know, fairly compensated for their loss. If they chose to sell those tokens before their value, went back up to a dollar, that was their choice. They say, quote, upon receipt of the Bitcoins recovered from the twenty sixteen secondurity breach, Bitfinex has pledged to use 80% of the proceeds to buy back and burn the the Leo tokens. I think the fifth token in the shell game they issued after all of the RRT tokens are redeemed. Essentially, Bitfinex wants the Bitcoins that were stolen in the hack back. They say they're gonna give some portion of them back to customers. It is unclear at this time what that actually materially means. Oh, oh my god. This is inevitably gonna go to court.

Speaker 3: Well, like, if you're Bitfinex, how can you not want $8,000,000,000 or what I what is today? $2,400,000,000 in in assets given to you? Like, who doesn't want that?

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 3: You know?

Speaker 1: Who doesn't? And I do. And I'll take them.

Speaker 3: And in the completely unregulated world, you can say, in air quotes, we've made everybody whole from this, and therefore, the assets have just been returned to us. But, you know, you've been made whole. So, you know, it's like similar to an insurance payout. We're just gonna keep this.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. And

Speaker 3: and then and then you just disappear into the sun Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Like everybody else. We made you whole whether it was with the token we issued that plunged to 20¢ on the dollar, the other token we issued that was convertible into stocks of a company that was just hacked for $3,000,000,000, we think we've paid our debt.

Speaker 3: Can we just start a crypto show?

Speaker 1: I don't know if I have it in me. That is just

Speaker 3: I don't

Speaker 1: know if I have it

Speaker 3: in me. Just just like mocks crypto. We make a weekly episode that's, like, twenty five minutes that we have to be, like, half drunk to record, and we just, like, Google CryptoCon and just, like, talk about the articles that pop up from the week.

Speaker 1: Half drunk sounds conservative for where I would have to be psychologically to do that. This was even tough.

Speaker 3: Like, it it makes me sad that the people who have the ability to control and stop all this bullshit haven't done anything. And it's like, I'm looking at you, federal reserve chair. I'm looking at you, like, president. I'm looking at people in power who should have been like, we have to nip this in the bud before it gets out of control because it's gonna really hurt people. And now it's really hurting people, and people are still not doing anything about it. And it's shocking to me. Shocking to me. Like, the SEC has been talking about regulating it, and it's like, what's the point? Like, just I don't know. Anyway, is what it is. Just this is the depression sets in, crypto depression.

Speaker 1: I have more to say, but I almost wanna play the music. I wanna play the, like, outro music as you just sort of mumble your way into depression at the current state of affairs in the crypto ecosystem.

Speaker 3: I'm totally okay with that.

Speaker 1: So there is an unanswered question here. If we go back to this hack, then we can end there. It's actually how that first, way back at the start of this thing, how that first remote access Trojan, the one that kicked off the whole heist Mhmm. Ended up on that Bitfinex executive's computer. Right? Presumably, someone had social engineered it onto there. Sure. Phished it. Exactly. But for a sense of how that might have worked, I'm actually gonna defer to Rosalcon herself and the 2019 talk that she gave called how to social engineer your way into anything. In a promotional flyer for the speech, she's she's wearing her Rosalcon outfit and holding a big cartoon sized wrench. I don't know what the thing with the wrenches is. Anyway, she starts the speech with some bars from that song for Sashi Badouin. It is unclear if this succeeds in warming up the crowd. She goes on to say, quote

Speaker 3: My my my favorite line from this podcast, by the way, was that ex that clip. It is unclear as to whether this warmed up the crowd.

Speaker 1: She goes on to say, quote, I hate the term manipulating. Social engineering involves, quote, getting someone to share information or take an action that they otherwise would not. So maybe this is how whoever the hacker is got the Trojan onto the Bitfinex executive system. It got them to reveal something, inadvertently sort of show their hand a little too much. But that line is funny taken in a different context. Because on the day of the original hack, in what the LA Times called either an unfortunate coincidence or a stunning act of hubris, Rosalcon posted a photo on Instagram, and it's a photo of her and her partner and alleged crime Dutch sitting on a couch. It's the day of the hack, and it says, quote, I will always love getting into trouble with this crazy guy. Thanks for listening, everybody, and thank you to our new patrons since the last episode, patreon.com/hackpodcast. Keith Horton. Thanks very much. Really appreciate your support. Ben Pike, thank you. Michael Ehlert, thank you very much. Your support means the world. If you wanna support the show, patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks for making it to the end of our, kinda, second one hour episode in a row. They're getting longer. Who knows where it's going next? Thanks for listening. We'll catch you in the next

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