TECH: BITCOIN LAUNDRIES
Forbes will release a show and documentary about it.

Net­flix was the first com­pa­ny to announce a project around alleged Bit­coin mon­ey laun­der­ers Heather “Raz­zlekhan” Mor­gan and Ilya Licht­en­stein, but unsur­pris­ing­ly it won’t be the last. Dead­line reports that Forbes Enter­tain­ment and EOne will team up to pro­duce two projects around the scan­dal: a script­ed series, as well as a doc­u­men­tary. Nat­u­ral­ly, both projects will be based on Forbes reports, but what’s more inter­est­ing is that Mor­gan was also a Forbes con­trib­u­tor for sev­er­al years.

Mor­gan and Licht­en­stein, or the “cryp­to cou­ple” as many now call them, are said to have attempt­ed to laun­der $3.6 bil­lion in bit­coins stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack. The cryp­to-cur­ren­cy was worth around $63.7 mil­lion when it was orig­i­nal­ly stolen, but is now val­ued at over $5 billion.

This mind-bog­gling fig­ure is main­ly down to the sky­rock­et­ing val­ue of bit­coin over the past few years. Notably, the bit­coin scan­dal is also the largest finan­cial seizure ever made by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice, beat­ing the $1 bil­lion recov­ered from the dark web mar­ket Silk Road in 2020.