Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill have been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for laundering more than $100 million from various criminal enterprises through Samourai, a cryptocurrency mixer service they ran for nearly a decade.
As detailed in a superseding indictment, criminals also used Samourai's Whirlpool crypto mixer to process over $2 billion in illicit funds between 2015 and February 2024.
In addition to crypto mixing services, Samourai also offered a service called "Ricochet," which allowed users to send cryptocurrency using additional and unnecessary intermediate transactions to thwart law enforcement and crypto exchange efforts to track funds sourced from criminal activity.
This money laundering activity allegedly earned the two founders around $4.5 million in fees 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 Wallet mobile application was also downloaded over 100,000 times, allowing users to store private keys for BTC addresses they controlled and exchange funds with other Samourai users in anonymous financial transactions.
Icelandic law enforcement has seized Samourai's domains (samourai[.]io and samouraiwallet[.]com) and web servers, and the Google Play Store removed the Android mobile app after being served a seizure warrant.
Rodriguez was taken into custody this morning and will appear before a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the Western District of Pennsylvania in the following days.
Hill was also arrested this morning in Portugal on U.S. criminal charges, with the U.S. government planning to request his extradition to the United States so that he can stand trial.
They're both charged with two counts of conspiracy: money laundering (20-year maximum sentence) and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business (5-year maximum 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 said.
"Samourai laundered over $100 million of crime proceeds originating from, among other criminal sources, illegal dark web markets, such as Silk Road and Hydra Market; various wire fraud and computer fraud schemes, including a web-server intrusion, a spearphishing scheme, and schemes to defraud multiple decentralized finance protocols; and other illegal