Arrested, seized, doxed and detained. These are just some of the ways police and prosecutors around the world took down the biggest cybercrime operations of the year, even if it meant resorting to new and unconventional eyebrow-raising methods. From stashing billions of bitcoin under the floorboards to teenage hackers gatecrashing Fortune 500 networks, this year saw some of the most jaw-dropping breaches — and the highest-profile apprehensions.
As we close out 2022, we look back at the cybercriminals we lost this year … to the law.
Sanctions and seizures hit the crypto scene
U.S. officials scored some major wins against crypto-laundering in 2022. At the beginning of the year, the Justice Department said it had seized more than $3.6 billion worth of bitcoins allegedly stolen in the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex and that it had arrested a married couple suspected of laundering the money.
The couple — Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31 — face up to 25 years in prison if convicted on charges of conspiring to launder money and defrauding the U.S. government.
Later in the year, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), a watchdog within the U.S. Treasury tasked with enforcing sanctions violations, announced that it had sanctioned decentralized cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash for its role in enabling billions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency to be laundered through its platform.
Tornado Cash, along with other mixers such as AlphaBay, allows customers to conceal the source of their crypto funds when participating in a transaction in exchange for a fee. It blends potentially identifiable or tainted cryptocurrency funds with others to obfuscate the source and destination of crypto assets. More than $1.5 billion in proceeds of crime, like ransomware and fraud, has been laundered through Tornado Cash to date, expe ..
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