RIYADH: A New York couple has been arrested for conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency funds — a crime which carries up to five years in prison if they are convicted, CNN Business reported.

Law enforcement officials seized $3.6 billion of that money in what Deputy US Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, called “the department’s largest financial seizure ever.”

Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan have also been accused of attempting to launder money taken in a massive hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex in 2016.

The arrests and confiscation of funds represented a victory for law enforcement in the US amid a large number of thefts from cryptocurrency platforms.

Hackers in recent years have made hundreds of millions of dollars simultaneously in attacks on virtual currency exchanges.

Last year, US officials recovered $2.3 million of the $4.4 million in ransom that Colonial Pipeline paid to a Russian-speaking gang.