Samourai Wallet Founders Sentenced to Prison for Laundering $237 Million in Crypto
Two founders of the cryptocurrency service Samourai Wallet have received actual prison sentences for laundering more than $237 million in criminal proceeds. The charges stemmed from the platform’s deliberate facilitation of illicit actors, helping them obscure the origins of digital assets tied to drug trafficking, hacking incidents, fraud schemes, contract killings, and even child sexual exploitation materials.
Prosecutors reported that 37-year-old Keonne Rodriguez and 67-year-old William Lonergan Hill pleaded guilty to conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Sentences were handed down in New York: Rodriguez received four years in prison, while Hill was sentenced to five. In addition to incarceration, each was ordered to pay a $250,000 fine and will serve three years of supervised release after completing their terms. Authorities also seized $6.3 million — the revenue Samourai Wallet earned from illegal operations.
Both were arrested in the spring of 2024: Rodriguez in the United States, and Hill in Portugal, from where he was later extradited. The operation was conducted with support from Icelandic law enforcement, which assisted in seizing the service’s domain and servers.
Samourai Wallet had been in operation since 2015 and offered users two principal tools for transaction anonymization. The first — Whirlpool — acted as an integrated mixer, blending users’ bitcoins to conceal the origin of funds. The second — Ricochet — created an additional chain of intermediary transfers, so-called “hops,” designed to complicate forensic tracing.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the founders not only knew their product was used by criminal networks, but actively promoted it within darknet communities as well as through messaging platforms and social media. Prosecutors cited their public statements and interactions with users connected to underground markets as evidence.
While the officially documented $237 million was linked to specific criminal cases, the total volume of funds moving through Samourai Wallet was vastly larger. Since 2017, Ricochet alone processed over 80,000 BTC, and Whirlpool since 2019 — more than $2 billion at the market value of that period. These figures underscore the platform’s extensive role in the criminal ecosystem.
The Samourai case forms part of a broader international crackdown on anonymous cryptocurrency mixers. In the spring of 2025, German authorities shut down the eXch service; in December 2024, Russian nationals behind the Blender and Sinbad mixers were detained; and in November of the same year, a U.S. court sentenced an Ohio resident for running the Helix mixing service.
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