Biggest Heist Ever 2024 Movie Review
In 2016, somebody reached their digital fingers into a wallet on the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, and helped themselves to 120,000 bitcoin. As a heist, it was a $70 million-dollar haul. But over time, as the crypto industry started to boom, that figure ballooned to over $4 billion in stolen funds. It was Internal Revenue Service money laundering investigator Chris Janczewski’s job to follow the funds, try and figure out who had them, and to be there when they tried to off-ramp the loot from the digital depths into a hard cash situation. Given the complexities of crypto and its virtual currency exchanges, this proved to be a difficult job for Janczewski. And that was before he had to watch all of Heather Morgan’s wacko Razzlekhan-tent.
Biggest Heist Ever knows it’s just not very interesting to feature investigators staring intently at computer screens, or intricate on-screen roadmaps of mazelike crypto networks. The heist happened years ago. And besides, during its investigation, the government didn’t even have the private key access that would show them the money. Janczewski says stolen crypto floating around in a visible blockchain is like a bank robbery where the money is right there but completely untouchable. Which is why former Forbes writer and tech world hustler Heather Morgan’s Razzlekhan persona is a boon, at least for documentary purposes. At every turn, her goofy vids and outsized, eccentric personality amplify the visual vibe in Biggest Heist.
Heather and Ilya definitely were not hiding their bling-y lifestyle. But Janczewski and the feds wondered: were Morgan and Lichtenstein, nicknamed the “Crypto Bonnie & Clyde,” hiding their criminal activity in the space between “Puff puff pass/I love me some grave grass” and “Spear fish your password, all your funds transferred”?
Janczewski is interviewed extensively in Biggest Heist Ever, as is Vanity Fair writer Nick Bilton, former cyber criminal Brett Johnson, a handful of people who were friends with Heather and Ilya throughout their lives, and people they encountered professionally. And as the federal dragnet tightens around the couple, and they’re still out there getting nuts or going big on the Internet, pretty much everyone comes to one conclusion. Morgan and Lichtenstein were either sure that they were about to get caught, or they believed in the power of their own teflon hustle.
There is an outcome in Biggest Heist Ever, if that’s what you’re after. But the value in this documentary is the bananas behavior it shows along the way. The doc gets a ton of mileage out of Heather Morgan’s lively and unpredictable social media presence, tracks down the people who helped her realize her Razzlekhan dreams, and does its best to probe her motivations. (Morgan’s college friends on the steady amplification of her alter ego: “Yeah, that seems about right.”) But Morgan isn’t the only thing being crazy in Biggest Heist. For the everyday viewer, the common thread in all of these recent documentaries about the subject is the free-for-all insanity of cryptocurrency. It feels like a closed-loop system, where people with either bad intentions or fluid morals earn millions and millions, only to largely skate on accountability. It’s more than a little infuriating!
But it’s also pretty interesting. We are sure to see the stream of crypto docs continue to flow, as the industry itself lives through another moment of exposure, expansion, and even more questions. But there’s a pretty decent chance none of those docs to come will have as quirky a personality as Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan as their centerpiece.
