A New Netflix Docuseries Tells The Story Of A Billion Dollar Virtual Heist
Always bringing us the grittiest and most gripping documentaries, from Gunther’s Millions to Pamela: A Love Story, is Netflix. Back at it again will be their latest thrilling new doc brought to life from the same people who made Tiger King and Frye: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and it’s set to be just as bingeworthy.
The yet-to-titled Bitfinex Netflix documentary is dipping into the turbulent world of cryptocurrency. It’s set to explore the infamous 2016 Bitfinex hack, in which a married couple managed to steal 119,756 Bitcoin, worth $72 million dollars at the time, before being tracked down and charged just under six years later.
The docuseries will be directed by Chris Smith, who helmed the documentary about the fraudulent Fyre Festival in 2019 before his notorious Tiger King series about Joe Exotic became a global sensation. The world of cryptocurrency might be a bit more confusing than those two subjects, but the story is no less amazing in its audacity: the Bitfinex hack ended up being the biggest criminal financial case in history.
The volatile nature of Bitcoin meant that the already huge $72 million stolen was worth close to $5 billion around the time that the US government tracked them down in early 2022. The Bitfinex exchange is based in Hong Kong, and announced in August 2016 that it had been hacked, and that the virtual wallets of around 2000 users had had funds diverted to a single wallet. This caused the Bitcoin (BTC) price to drop by 20%, and the exchange halt all trading.
By the next year, funds were beginning to be moved from the single wallet through a black market website to be laundered, and when that black market site was shut down by the FBI, it switched to another. It wasn’t until 2022 when a couple living in New York, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, were charged by US authorities for laundering the virtual money, now worth billions. It was found that the funds had partly been spent on things like gold, Walmart vouchers, NFTs, Uber rides and a PlayStation console, but around 80% still remained as Bitcoin. While the couple still haven’t been found guilty yet, they face 20 years in prison and up to 5 more years for conspiracy to defraud the US.
The multi part docuseries has been in development for a while, though it still doesn’t have a set release date yet. Netflix has promised though that it’ll tell the whole audacious story while explaining the often confusing terminology of crypto exchanges and virtual wallets in an easy to understand way. You can expect it arriving on the platform sometime later this year.
Can’t wait? check out our edit of the best documentaries directed by women