I Never Meant to Empower Bitcoin Bonnie & Clyde (But I Guess I Did)

I Never Meant to Empower Bitcoin Bonnie & Clyde (But I Guess I Did)

Last week the US Department of Justice arrested a couple in Manhattan, both in their 30s, and charged them with a conspiracy to launder cryptocurrency stolen during the 2016 hack of the virtual currency exchange Bitfinex. The amount of cryptocurrency that the Justice department seized is currently worth about $3.6 billion, which makes this by far the largest seizure in the history of the federal government. People have been calling the couple “Bitcoin Bonnie and Clyde.”

A fact I learned about Heather Morgan that especially alarmed me is that as recently as  late January she was an occasional contributor to Inc.com, going back to January 2016, when I was the editor-in-chief of Inc. magazine and Inc.com. It may surprise readers to know that I have no idea who she is, and no recollection of anything she published on the site while I worked there (I left Inc. in the fall of 2019).

In a 2019 YouTube video, Morgan explained that she found her way into the annual Inc. 5000 conference and approached an Inc. editor, who explained to her how to apply for a column. No one I’ve spoken to has any recollection of signing her up, although our former video editor did recall meeting her at a conference. (Inc.’s current editor did not reply to an interview request.) 

How, one might ask, does an editor-in-chief repeatedly publish the work of a writer he knows nothing about? Good question.