Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill are facing charges from the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly laundering more than $100 million from various criminal enterprises through Samourai, a cryptocurrency mixer service they operated for almost ten years.
According to a superseding indictment, criminals utilized Samourai’s Whirlpool crypto mixer to process more than $2 billion in illicit funds from 2015 to February 2024.
Apart from providing crypto mixing services, Samourai also introduced a feature named “Ricochet,” enabling users to send cryptocurrency through unnecessary intermediate transactions to evade law enforcement and crypto exchange tracking efforts of funds linked to criminal origins.
The alleged money laundering activities reportedly generated approximately $4.5 million in fees for the founders from Whirlpool and Ricochet transactions.
The indictment claims that since the inception of the Whirlpool service around 2019 and the Ricochet service around 2017, over 80,000 BTC (equivalent to over $2 billion based on BTC-USD conversion rates at each transaction time) have flowed through these two services operated by Samourai.
Samourai’s Wallet mobile app, which garnered over 100,000 downloads, enabled users to securely store private keys for BTC addresses they managed and conduct anonymous financial transactions with other Samourai users.
Following a seizure warrant, Icelandic authorities have confiscated Samourai’s domains (samourai[.]io and samouraiwallet[.]com) and web servers, while the Android mobile app was removed from the Google Play Store.
Samourai seizure banner (DOJ)
Rodriguez was apprehended this morning and is set to appear before a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the Western District of Pennsylvania in the coming days.
Hill was also arrested this morning in Portugal on U.S. criminal charges, with extradition to the United States being pursued for his trial.
Both individuals are facing charges of conspiracy, including money laundering (with a maximum sentence of 20 years) and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business (with a maximum sentence of 5 years).
Despite marketing Samourai as a ‘privacy’ service, the defendants allegedly knew that it served as a hub for criminals to conduct extensive money laundering and sanctions evasion activities, as per the DOJ statement.
“Samourai facilitated the laundering of over $100 million in criminal proceeds originating from various illegal sources, including dark web markets like Silk Road and Hydra Market, wire fraud, computer fraud schemes, and decentralized finance protocol fraud,” the DOJ added.