Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill have been charged by the U.S. Division of Justice for laundering greater than $100 million from varied legal enterprises via Samourai, a cryptocurrency mixer service they ran for almost a decade.
As detailed in a superseding indictment, criminals additionally used Samourai’s Whirlpool crypto mixer to course of over $2 billion in illicit funds between 2015 and February 2024.
Along with crypto mixing companies, Samourai additionally supplied a service known as “Ricochet,” which allowed customers to ship cryptocurrency utilizing further and pointless intermediate transactions to thwart regulation enforcement and crypto trade efforts to trace funds sourced from legal exercise.
This cash laundering exercise allegedly earned the 2 founders round $4.5 million in charges for Whirlpool and Ricochet transactions.
“Since the start of the Whirlpool service in or about 2019, and of the Ricochet service in or about 2017, over 80,000 BTC (worth over $2 billion applying the BTC-USD conversion rates at the time of each transaction) has passed through these two services operated by Samourai,” the indictment alleges.
Samourai’s Pockets cellular software was additionally downloaded over 100,000 instances, permitting customers to retailer non-public keys for BTC addresses they managed and trade funds with different Samourai customers in nameless monetary transactions.
Icelandic regulation enforcement has seized Samourai’s domains (samourai[.]io and samouraiwallet[.]com) and internet servers, and the Google Play Retailer eliminated the Android cellular app after being served a seizure warrant.
​Rodriguez was taken into custody this morning and can seem earlier than a U.S. Justice of the Peace Decide within the Western District of Pennsylvania within the following days.
Hill was additionally arrested this morning in Portugal on U.S. legal fees, with the U.S. authorities planning to request his extradition to the US in order that he can stand trial.
They’re each charged with two counts of conspiracy: cash laundering (20-year most sentence) and working an unlicensed money-transmitting enterprise (5-year most sentence).
“While offering Samourai as a ‘privacy’ service, the defendants knew that it was a haven for criminals to engage in large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion,” the DOJ mentioned.
“Samourai laundered over $100 million of crime proceeds originating from, amongst different legal sources, unlawful darkish internet markets, akin to Silk Highway and Hydra Market; varied wire fraud and pc fraud schemes, together with a web-server intrusion, a spearphishing scheme, and schemes to defraud a number of decentralized finance protocols; and different unlawful
