In the year 2022, the feds have nabbed a Bitcoin-laundering power couple, one half of whom is a crypto wallet CEO who is also a terrible rapper. Federal authorities detained Heather Morgan and Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein on Tuesday for allegedly laundering $4.5 billion in Bitcoin stolen in a 2016 theft. Because, of course, the spouses used some of the stolen monies, $3.6 billion of which has been recovered, to acquire non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to the Department of Justice’s affidavit.
The juicy specifics of the couple’s alleged misdeeds are certainly intriguing — including the extent to which they allegedly went to conceal their identities online while laundering the Bitcoin — but the component of this story that is probably the most bizarre has nothing to do with blockchain. Morgan, the CEO of the Endpass Ethereum wallet startup, whose website is presently offline, also moonlights as a rapper under the moniker “Razzlekhan,” according to The Daily Beast. A quick look at her YouTube channel reveals just how bad her “raps” are.
Take her music video for “Versace Bedouin,” for example. Leaving aside the possibility that Morgan isn’t a member of the nomadic Bedouin people and hence shouldn’t be referring to herself as one, the song is a disgrace to music in general, let alone hip hop. She enunciates like Chantal from “Search Party,” crams too many syllables into each line, uses the most cringe-worthy rhymes, and even refers to herself as a “badass money maker.”
“Wall Street’s famed Crocodile attacks once more!” reads her website, which has a nebula-themed background from the mid-2010s. “She’s going on everyone from huge tech corporations to healthcare to financial dudes, more bold and shameless than ever before.” Morgan defines herself as a “specialist in persuasion, social engineering, and game theory” in her Forbes bio – yes, she was a Forbes contributor.
Even funnier, the bio boasts that “[Morgan] enjoys rapping and designing streetwear apparel when she’s not reverse-engineering black marketplaces to conceive of better ways to combat fraud and cybercrime.” It’s deliciously ironic that a crypto CEO who claimed to be anti-cybercrime took part in the DOJ’s allegations, which include the claim that they “used numerous sophisticated laundering techniques, including using fictitious identities to set up online accounts,” according to the DOJ, which worked with the IRS and the FBI to arrest the couple. There’s clearly more to this story than meets the eye, but we’ve heard enough after listening to “Versace Bedouin.”
