The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has made a major breakthrough in the fight against cybercrime by arresting the co-founders of a cryptocurrency mixer called Samourai. Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill have been charged with facilitating over $2 billion in illegal transactions and laundering more than $100 million in criminal proceeds.
The DoJ alleges that Rodriguez and Hill intentionally designed Samourai to help criminals engage in money laundering and sanctions evasion, while marketing it as a privacy-oriented service. The operation involved illegal dark web marketplaces, spear-phishing schemes, and scams targeting decentralized finance protocols.
Law enforcement agencies from Iceland and Portugal, along with Europol, collaborated in the operation, resulting in the confiscation of Samourai’s digital infrastructure and the removal of its Android app from the Google Play Store in the U.S. Hill, who was apprehended in Portugal, is awaiting extradition to the U.S., while Rodriguez has been taken into custody in Pennsylvania.
Samourai offered a cryptocurrency mixing service known as Whirlpool, as well as a feature called Ricochet Send, which added intermediate hops to cryptocurrency transactions to conceal their origin. The DoJ alleges that these features were designed to prevent law enforcement and cryptocurrency exchanges from identifying funds derived from criminal activity.
The arrests come on the heels of a former security engineer being sentenced to three years in prison for hacking decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges and laundering stolen funds using Samourai Whirlpool. The DoJ’s crackdown on cybercrime continues to make strides in holding individuals accountable for illegal activities in the cryptocurrency space.