Ilya Lichtenstein, the hacker currently serving a five-year prison sentence for stealing billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin from crypto exchange Bitfinex, sent a message today from his jail cell: It was all his fault, and his wife shouldn’t be punished for his misdeeds.
Lichtenstein’s wife, Heather Morgan—perhaps better known by her rapping moniker “Razzlekhan”—was herself sentenced to 18 months in a U.S. prison for helping her husband launder the stolen funds.
Last fall, Morgan admitted in federal court that she used various tactics to hide the haul of Bitcoin worth about $11.6 billion by today’s prices—including converting the crypto into gold coins and burying them.
In a prison video call posted to X (formerly known as Twitter) on Thursday, Lichtenstein claimed that his wife had no knowledge of the Bitfinex hack for years and was not involved in it in any way.
“While it is true that my wife pleaded guilty to laundering a small portion of the funds, she was in no way involved in the hack itself,” he said, appearing at times to be reading off of notes. “In many ways my wife, who I love so, so much, is just another victim of my bad decisions.”
In the background of the video, another inmate appears to partially remove his shirt and rub his stomach for several seconds.
The video was accompanied by the hashtag “#FreeRazzlekhan.”
Since receiving her sentence last month, Morgan, aka Razzlekhan, has incorporated her journey through America’s legal system into her music. Earlier this month, she released a track detailing the struggle of being incarcerated and separated from her husband during the lead-up to their sentencing.
Morgan has yet to report to prison to serve out her sentence. She has, in the meantime, spent her days making paid videos on Cameo.
On Thursday, Morgan reposted her husband’s prison video statement, saying it pushed back against “false claims” made in a recent Netflix documentary about the Bitfinex hack. The film described Morgan and Lichtenstein as a “cringey couple” out of “a bad spy novel.”
Lichtenstein, for his part, also seems eager to get out from behind bars. In Thursday’s video, he made the case that he should be valued for his expertise and hired to thwart other hackers.
“I have a particular set of skills,” Liechtenstein said, in an apparent reference to the 2008 Liam Neeson film Taken. “And I believe I can use those skills to do a lot of good in the cybersecurity industry.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
