If Heather Morgan revealed the alleged secret to her success, the aspiring TikTok business influencer may have had more than nine followers.
Ms Morgan, also known as the aspiring rapper Razzlekhan, charged in the massive $4.5bn bitcoin hack of Bitfinex, attempted to follow up her prolific business writing contributions at Forbes Magazine and Inc.com as a business influencer on the social media platform.
She was charged with her husband, Ilya "Dutch" Lichtenstein, on money laundering and fraud charges and faces a maximum of 25 years in prison for what prosecutors call a "methodical and calculated scheme” to transfer cryptocurrency through a “labyrinth” of darknet transactions over the past five years.
In that period, Ms Morgan launched her TikTok in late 2020 with her first video explaining how she made a "multi-million dollar business" in her 20s with no outside funding, no connections, and no trust fund.
The five other videos from the debut in December 2020 to January 2021 were a series of critiques of a marketing email from Zoom.
The “#WordsOfWisdom” on “how I made my dreams a reality” mocked, on delay, after her alleged role in the bitcoin hack was revealed by the Department of Justice, which called it both their largest-ever cryptocurrency seizure and largest seizure ever.
“Proud of you bestie! Enjoy prison,” one commenter wrote.
She was a more prolific business thought leader on her Instagram and Twitter, and especially Forbes, where she wrote more than 50 articles, and Inc, where she published more than 140 columns on sales and marketing.
Inc.com said in a news story that her role at the publication had been terminated following the arrest.
“She began writing her ‘Influence Talks’ column in 2016. It was terminated today,” the story said.
While the volume of public attention has been focused on the music videos of her Razzlekhan alter-ego, and the seemingly prolific career as a writer for major business publications, the advice she gave in her debut TikTok video is, indeed, reflective of the Silicon Valley mantra she said taught her everything she knows.
“It goes like this: Automate, eliminate, delegate, ok … what does that mean?” she said in the video. “First, you eliminate all the things that you don’t need to do. Because we all have too much to do and we can’t get anything done if we try to do too many things at once.
“Next, you automate. You use technology, software to make things more efficient, especially repetitive, mundane processes and tasks,” she added.
The couple allegedly used programs to automate transactions for a rapid amount in a short period as part of a sophisticated money laundering technique to obfuscate transaction history by breaking up the flow of funds.
