‘Biggest Heist Ever’ and Forcing a True Crime Narrative

The new Netflix documentary is more ‘Burn After Reading,’ than ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’

When I read Zeke Faux’s book about the crypto industry, Number Go Up, the story of Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein amused me. They were total doofuses who managed to steal $72 million in Bitcoin from the Bitfinex currency exchange. Faux uses this case to highlight his larger point about the lack of security surrounding cryptocurrency and that you don’t need to be a genius to extract vast sums of an unregulated, highly speculative commodity.

Chris Smith’s new Netflix documentary Biggest Heist Ever needs Morgan and Lichtenstein to be geniuses, or at least savvy enough to steal $72 million that, due to the rise in Bitcoin prices, had ballooned to $4.5 billion. This leads to a tonally confused story that never seems to accurately size up its protagonists or larger aspects of the criminal underworld. At most, the documentary sees the couple as freak show criminals adept enough at hacking to steal Bitcoin.

Looking at Morgan and Lichtenstein, I feel a little bad for them. They both seem like lonely kids (I knew people like them growing up) who grew up into awkward adults. Oddly, I think all the cringe in their social media videos arises from two people desperate to be seen. Swiping digital money was the kind of bloodless crime they would be comfortable with to fund a grandiose lifestyle.

Photo by Vasilis Chatzopoulos on Unsplash