BEFORE: I must admit that over the last few weeks, maybe through the last third of this Doc Block, the days have all started to kind of run together for me. This is the annual summer slowdown, of course - the theater isn't closed, exactly, but there are very few events and this when there are improvement projects done, like fixing the roof or painting the place, and getting it ready for the coming school year. I've taken up the job hunt once again, and collected partial unemployment, however that has involved some in-person meetings across town with a job counselor, who has forced me to keep a digital record of everything I've applied for, and, well, it's been a lot. Nothing makes the summer pass by more slowly than scrolling through lists of online job postings for office jobs that I suspect don't really exist, and lately I've been looking at postings for jobs in pizza shops and cookie bakeries, just because that would at least be something to do, although there's the chance that those jobs will make me hate pizza and cookies, which sounds like a terrible fate.
In two days things are going to change, though, I've got shifts again starting on Sunday, at about the same time I go back to watching fiction films and not docs. Right now I don't even care, give me a long shift working at a film festival, I just want to get out of the house and GO somewhere that doesn't cost me a lot of money. Somewhere I can earn some money would probably be better, though. Sure, I have a savings account but I hate to have to dip into it, I left it alone all during the COVID years and now I'm suddenly forced to transfer some money into checking - so perhaps even after I get busy again I shouldn't stop job-hunting, really a second gig would be most helpful right now, but it just has to be the RIGHT second gig, because I can't let it interfere with the primary gig. However now I'm getting texts from bots asking me to apply for other jobs I don't want, or suggesting interviews for jobs I didn't apply for. Please, I love the internet but I just hate when it wants to waste my time.
Mark Cuban carries over from "Rather".
THE PLOT: Morgan, a Forbes contributor and hipster rapper, and her husband Lichtenstein were arrested after being accused of conspiring to launder nearly 120,000 stolen Bitcoins.
AFTER: You really have to feel a little sorry for the FBI agents in today's film, these are trained professionals who have prepared themselves for the possibility that they might have to watch videos of kidnappings, murders, even torture porn in order to bring criminals to justice - but instead they find themselves scrolling through a white rapper's TikTok videos, looking for clues in the background. Nobody should have to do that. The lead suspects in this 2016 Bitfinex crypto heist turned out to be this young and (mostly) unassuming Manhattan couple, who lived downtown in a FiDi loft. Well, some people say it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for - only the wife had a dark side on social media under the rap name Razzlekhan, and some of her rhymes were truly horrendous, in addition to being culturally inappropriate.
Based on the film's interviews with their friends and colleagues, nobody seemed to know that this couple was sitting on several million in BitCoins that had risen in value after the heist to about $4.5 billion. Sure, there were signs, like the fact that they lived downtown, where real estate is at a premium, but that maybe could be explained by their dealings with internet start-ups, maybe one did pay off for Ilya somewhere along the way, and he cashed out by selling his start-up to a private equity firm or something. Their choice of pet should have been another tip-off, they doted on one of those exotic cats that cost a couple grand, like who even buys one of those? Like an ocelot or something, which I'm not sure is even legal to own in NYC.
But all of the investigative threads kept leading back to this couple, they seemed to be at the center of a web of internet activity, based on the server details of thousands of crypto transfers from here to there and back again. So that's where the FBI found themselves, digging through the hundreds, thousands of this woman's videos that displayed signs of the extravagant lifestyle they were enjoying in Lower Manhattan, which really stopped being a party scene some time in 2001, nobody is really sure why. That meant spotting the leg massager under her desk and figuring out how much that cost, checking to see how much they spent on vacation travel to places like Turkey and Japan, and then costing out how much it costs to shoot a rap video these days. (umm, not much if you just use your phone and don't spend any money on improving your rhymes)
Worse are those videos where Heather talks to her followers, because she has exactly zero stage presence, she's not dynamic or engaging at all, she seems to be in some kind of daze or fog, like a foreigner who's having trouble with the English language almost. It's all very weird. How could she and her very, very much quieter husband have stolen so much money and then just sat on it for years? This would be a bit like finding out that the cringey Australian white break-dancer at the Olympics was also planning to commit a terrorist act at the Games. I mean, sure, now everything makes a little bit more sense, but it's really also the absolute last person that you would have suspected of being capable of that.
The whole crypto-currency thing turned out to be a double-edged sword of sorts. Everything in the digital wallets is encrypted, which means that someone would need a password with hundreds of characters to access it. (The whole encryption thing with block chain is somehow bad for the environment, but in a way that I never quite understand, something about using a lot of water?) But some hacker set up a system where they got an e-mail from Bitfinex every time someone logged in, and that e-mail contained their Account name and also the very very long encrypted password. And then one day in August 2016, somebody signed on, used all the account names and all the passwords, and transferred out all the Bitcoins.
The other hitch is that crypto transfers are public transactions, everyone can SEE the money being transferred from one place to another, but without the passwords, nobody else can access it or move it or find out who it belongs to. So as the FBI guy says, it's like somebody walked into a bank, emptied the vault and then left the money out on the sidewalk, but whenever somebody tried to touch it, it suddenly re-appeared a block away. Also they got caught on camera, but then somehow erased all the video of them stealing the money. According to an expert cyber-criminal, it would take a really expert cyber-criminal to do all this. Also according to him, the husband is related to a really expert cyber-criminal, so his theory is that the couple maybe had a little help. So it's possible that the story isn't over, Ilya is serving five years in prison and Heather got only 18 months and then three years of supervised release.
Does the punishment fit the crime? I guess that depends on whether you use the value of the BitCoins when they were stolen, or the approximate value of what they were worth a few years later. Now, don't you wish you bought BitCoin in 2016? I had such a bad experience with buying stocks that I didn't trust BitCoin at all, but apparently even a schoolteacher who bought like five BitCoins back then is now a millionaire, so I guess that's on me. My boss did an NFT a few years ago, but I made sure he got paid for his artwork and then was out of the deal, because I just felt the NFT market was far too shaky. I think the bottom dropped out of the whole NFT market, but it still exists, and who knows, it may come back, but it still seems stupid to me. I guess I'm in the generation that's in-between, we're young enough to be on social media but old enough to not understand crypto.
The people who had their BitCoins stolen were offered some compensation, however they were given new BitCoins at the level they were at back then, not equivalent to what the old BitCoins would be worth now if they were never stolen - and for some people, that's not enough and they won't rest until they get what they think they are owed. Meanwhile, Trump tried to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the U.S., using some of what was recovered from the Bitfinex heist. Great, that's exactly what we need, a financial safety plan for the country that could completely bottom out or disappear at any moment, and there's already a proven track record of a currency exchange being hacked, despite the hundred-character encryptions. Plus there's also a movie that tells people how it was done - seems like a solid plan. (#WCPGW?)
Bottom line, it's a shame that we can't arrest someone for making bad TikTok videos - as a society we should really look into closing that little legal loophole. Right, something about free speech, blah blah, that doesn't make it right.
Directed by Chris Smith (director of "Wham!" and "Sr.")
Also starring Miguel Asuzano, Nick Bilton, Lynn Cannon, Frankie Cavazos, Cavier Coleman, Kitty Davies, John Giannoe, Hussam Hammo, Chris Janczewski, Brett Johnson, Sheel Kohli, Pierce Cameron Larick, Travis Lybbert, Gianni Martire, Martin Molina, Kyle Peevers, Ari Redbord, Zach Serota, Rachel Siegel, Dyrohn Southerland,
with archive footage of Ilya Lichtenstein, Heather "Razzlekhan" Morgan, Awkwafina (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Mike Myers (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Mindy Sterling, Robert Wagner (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Mark Zuckerberg (last seen in "Join or Die"), Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, Jeff Sessions.
RATING: 5 out of 10 now-ironic Forbes articles about cyber-security
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