Culture

Couple accused in $3.6B bitcoin scheme's real crime is being unfathomably cringe

Razzlekhan was the rap alter ego of Heather Morgan, one of the parties involved in the bitcoin laundering scheme.

This week a husband and wife duo were arrested in New York following accusations that they had attempted to launder close to 120,000 bitcoin (currently valued at more than $5 billion), which was stolen from an exchange called Bitfinex. According to Reuters, it was the U.S. Justice Department’s largest financial seizure ever.

The two parties facing charges are Ilya "Dutch" Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, who are both New York residents. Back in 2016, Bitfinex, a popular Bitcoin exchange, was hacked and some users had their wallets emptied. Over the last five years since the digital heist, the Lichtensteins had supposedly laundered 25,000 bitcoin (just over $1 billion), while the remaining 94,000 bitcoin (around $3.6 billion) was recovered by the Justice Department, as mentioned previously.

It gets worse— While being accused of laundering billions of dollars in crypto is pretty bad, perhaps the biggest crime involved, which was not part of the official charges against the couple, is an unparalleled commitment to producing nuclear levels of cringe. Morgan in particular has been fairly active online, performing and rapping under the name Razzlekhan which, per her website, is an alias that’s “like Genghis Khan, but with more pizzazz.”

The video above was recorded for a song entitled “Versace Bedouin” and was “dedicated to all weirdos, entrepreneurs, hackers, misfits, and all the unique people who pursue what they want.” It would be one thing to create awful, parody rap but to do so as a side-hustle, on top of allegedly stealing generational wealth is mind-boggling.

Warning: What follows is a quick collection of snippets and videos that Morgan released under her rap pseudonym that may cause extreme levels of cringe.