- A suspect charged as part of the 2016
Bitfinex hack had an alter-ego as a rapper named "Razzlekhan." - In raps, she said she had a "hacker mindset" and said "following the rules is for fools."
- She had another side gig in which she advised clients on how to write cold emails.
One of the suspects involved in the multibillion-dollar
Thirty-one-year-old Heather R. Morgan — who was arrested Tuesday in Manhattan along with her husband Ilya Lichtenstein for the infamous Bitfinex hack — had a prominent social media presence, where she existed as her alter-ego rapper "Razzlekhan," and dubbed herself the "Crocodile of Wall Street."
In raps, she said she had a "hacker mindset" and aligned herself with GameStop meme-stock mania last year. She even penned an article for Forbes advising companies on how to protect themselves from cybercriminals. (One of these articles was syndicated by Insider in 2021.) Because of the pandemic, "cybercriminals and fraudsters are taking advantage of this unexpected disruption, leading to a spike in scams and cybercrime," she wrote in June 2020.
Morgan now faces the possibility of a 20-year prison sentence for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiring to defraud the United States as part of the 2016 hack in which nearly 120,000 bitcoins were stolen from crypto exchange Bitfinex and placed in a wallet allegedly belonging to Lichtenstein, the US Justice Department said in a Tuesday press release. They haven't been charged with the hack itself.
Morgan and Lichtenstein did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment via their social media accounts. Their lawyer, identified by Bloomberg as Anirudh Bansal, also was not immediately available to comment to Insider.
Morgan had a bevy of side jobs and called herself a serial entrepreneur, while her husband said he was a "tech entrepreneur, explorer, and occasional magician."
She also started a company called SalesFolk, in which she advised clients on writing cold emails, and was even a guest speaker at a Ted-Talk like event in which she discussed "how to social engineer your way into anything," Bloomberg first reported.
Social engineering generally involves manipulating people to give up confidential information like passwords. In her talk, she discussed it as a method for job hunting and event crashing. She started her talk with a rap, in which she said "blindly following rules is for fools."
Last year when an army of retail traders banded together to drive massive gains in ailing stocks like GameStop, Morgan posted a rap video on TikTok that received mixed reviews. She urged retail traders to "hodl," aka hang onto their stock positions.
"Our mission is noble; yeah wanna be a mogul," she rapped.