The 120,000 Bitcoin Bitfinex Heist to be Turned into a Netflix Documentary

The world of cryptocurrencies, particularly in its earlier years, had a popularity of being the taking part in floor of hackers and varied malicious entities. And whereas this has modified to a enormous diploma previously few years and the sphere obtained large recognition and regulatory readability, the ghosts of its previous stay.

One of essentially the most notorious Bitcoin hacks happened again in 2016 when somebody stole roughly 120,000 BTC from one of many largest cryptocurrency exchanges – Bitfinex. Now, given every little thing that has occurred since Netflix desires to flip it into a documentary.

Let’s dive in.

It’s 2016, Bitfinex Gets Hacked for 120,000 BTC

Back in August 2016, the cryptocurrency world, albeit a lot… a lot smaller on the time, skilled one in all its main shakedowns when information broke out that Bitfinex noticed 119.756 BTC being stolen from its platform. Back then, the quantity was value roughly $66 million.

Although the Mt. Gox hack was proportionally larger, this stays some of the critical monetary crimes in trendy historical past, given the meteoric rise of BTC’s value to date. At the time of this writing, the 120K BTC is presently value over $5 billion.

In any case, the theft sparked large confusion and frustration. The supply of the vulnerability appeared to be in the way in which the trade structured its accounts, utilizing the BTC pockets supplier BitGo which added yet another layer of safety for the transactions.

Fast Forward to 2022: The US DoJ Arrests a Couple

Just a few days in the past, on February eighth, CryptoPotato reported that the US authorities, within the face of the Department of Justice, arrested Ilya Lichtenstein (34) and Heather Morgan (31). The DoJ accused them of conspiring to launder 119,754 BTC after an attacker stole them by over 20,000 unauthorized transactions from Bitfinex within the above heist.

Now, a essential clarification right here is that the couple isn’t accused of truly orchestrating the hack however moderately of making an attempt to launder the money stolen by it. This, amongst some downright ridiculous circumstances, led many to consider that they don’t seem to be answerable for the hack.

Speaking of weird occasions, a easy instance would be that the authorities declare they discovered the personal keys to the BTC fortune saved on a, get this, a cloud service. That’s proper – the accused saved the personal keys to 120K BTC on what could simply have been Google Cloud. To the uninitiated, protecting your personal keys on an offline medium always is without doubt one of the (if not the) most necessary safety rules that anybody stepping into the sphere of cryptocurrencies ought to comply with. For some extra safety ideas, take a have a look at our intensive information.

All issues thought-about, the drama surrounding the occasions appears to have caught the eye of the streaming behemoth – Netflix.

Netflix Wants to Turn it into a Documentary

A press release from February eleventh reads that:

Netflix has ordered a documentary collection about a married couple’s alleged scheme to launder billions of {dollars} value of stolen cryptocurrency within the greatest prison monetary crime case in historical past.

To be truthful, that’s positively not the “biggest criminal financial crime case in history.” As we talked about above, the Mt. Gox hack noticed BTC value round six occasions that stolen.

In any case, the documentary is about to be directed and produced by Chris Smith and Nick Bilton.