Crypto laundering lands jail time for Samourai Wallet execs

Samourai Wallet CEO Keonne Rodriguez and CTO William Lonergan Hill have been sentenced to five years and four years in prison, respectively, for laundering more than $237 million through the cryptocurrency mixing service they co-founded, GBHackers News reports.

Prosecutors showed the pair built Samourai to hide illegal Bitcoin transactions. It offered Whirlpool, which mixed Bitcoin among groups of users to obscure origins, and Ricochet, which added extra "hops" between sending and receiving addresses to thwart forensic tracking. More than 80,000 Bitcoin worth over $2 billion passed through these services, earning Samourai about $6 million in fees. The laundered funds stemmed from different crimes such as narcotics, child exploitation sites, cyber intrusions, fraud, sanctions evasion, murder-for-hire-schemes, and darknet commerce.

U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote imposed three years of supervised release and $250,000 fines for each defendant. They have already forfeited over $6.36 million, representing Samourai's revenue, toward a total forfeiture judgment of $237,832,360.55. The case involved extensive international cooperation among the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs, Icelandic Police, Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation, the FBI, Europol, and Portuguese Judicial Police.