A New York man has been sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to a $4.5bn bitcoin theft dubbed the cryptocurrency “heist of the century”, US officials said on Thursday.
Court documents said Ilya Lichtenstein, 35, hacked into the Bitfinex crypto exchange in 2016, and made more than 2,000 transactions to transfer 119,754 bitcoins into his accounts.
Justice officials said Lichtenstein used “sophisticated [money] laundering techniques”.
Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, were arrested in February 2022. While the bitcoins were worth about $70mn at the time of the theft, they were valued at more than $4.5bn when the couple were arrested.
Morgan, who pleaded guilty in 2023, is due to be sentenced on Monday.