A U.S. court has sentenced the co-founders of the cryptocurrency wallet Samourai Wallet — Keonn Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill. For organizing money laundering through an illegal money transfer service, they will serve five and four years in prison, respectively.
This is reported by Business • Media
Characteristics of the Crime and Details of the Sentence
According to the prosecution, Samourai Wallet knowingly processed over $237 million in criminal proceeds. The funds came from illegal drug trafficking, darknet markets, cyber intrusions, fraudulent operations, sanctioned jurisdictions, contract killing schemes, and even child pornography websites. Rodriguez is set to be punished on November 6, 2025, while Hill will be sentenced on November 19 of the same year.
Both convicts must not only serve their prison sentences but also pay a fine of $250,000 each upon release. Additionally, they have been assigned three years of supervised release. A total of $6.37 million has already been paid as part of the forfeiture, which is part of the total amount of $237.8 million determined by the court as illegally obtained income.
Operation of Samourai Wallet and Obfuscation Tools
The Samourai Wallet service operated as a mobile application with two key tools for concealing the origin of cryptocurrency. The first, Whirlpool, provided mixing of group transactions, complicating the tracking of Bitcoin chains. The second, Ricochet, created additional artificial transactions for even greater obfuscation of the money’s route. Since the launch of Ricochet in 2017 and Whirlpool in 2019, over 80,000 BTC, equivalent to over $2 billion at that time, have passed through these services. The service earned over $6 million in fees.
The investigation established that Hill advertised Samourai Wallet on the darknet forum Dread as a service for “cleaning dirty Bitcoins,” while Rodriguez encouraged hackers on then-Twitter to use Whirlpool for transferring stolen funds. In correspondence, Rodriguez explicitly referred to mixing as “money laundering with Bitcoin.”
“The sentences received by the defendants send a clear signal that laundering known criminal proceeds — regardless of the technology used and whether these proceeds are in the form of fiat money or cryptocurrency — will have serious consequences,” stated Rus.
The prosecution emphasized that such services make it impossible to return stolen funds to the victims of fraud.
It is worth noting that Rodriguez and Hill were arrested in April 2024 on charges of laundering over $100 million and conducting illegal transactions exceeding $2 billion. In July of the same year, Hill was released on a $1 million bail. In July 2025, both pleaded guilty in a plea deal that allowed them to avoid the maximum sentence of 20 years and agreed to the forfeiture of $238 million. At the end of October, the prosecution filed a memorandum requesting a five-year sentence for each of the defendants.