jakiro
Author: nikhilesh de, Cheyenne Lign
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors accused the founders of Samulai Wallet Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill conspiring money laundering. The U.S. government continued to sue cryptocurrency mixed tools that illegal actors and foreign governments used to hide capital transfer.
According to a press release issued on Wednesday, the two developed, marketing, and operating the mixture, which “promoted more than 100 million US dollars of money laundering transactions from the illegal dark web market.”
The press release said that since 2015, Samourai has led to a total of about 2 billion US dollars of “illegal transactions”.The attached indictment states that this number is determined based on the “time of each transaction” of Bitcoin.
According to the prosecutor,The 35 -year -old Rodriguez and 65 -year -old Hill charge about $ 4.5 million.According to the indictment, different functions have different pool fees.
The two were accused of making money laundering and conspiracy to operate unauthorized remittance business.The maximum sentences of these charges are 20 and 5 years, respectively.
According to the press release, Rodriguez was arrested on Wednesday morning and will be tried today or tomorrow in Pennsylvania.Hill, chief technical officer of Samourai Wallet, was arrested in Portugal on Wednesday morning and will be extradited to the United States.
The Samourai Wallet website on Iceland has also been seized and issued a seizure order to the Google Play store for Samourai mobile applications.
After Samourai Wallet’s developers were accused on Wednesday, the homepage of its website was replaced by US official warnings.(Samourai Wallet)
The press release of the US Department of Justice said,Samourai has been developing since 2015. Rodriguez and Hill “encouraged and publicly invited users to launder money through mixers”,The download volume of the mobile application has exceeded 100,000 times.
“In Samourai, we fully focus on resisting the review system and the black/gray cycle economy,” said a private information of Hill.”This means that there will be no foreseeable large -scale adoption, although the black/gray market has begun to expand during the epidemic, and it will continue to expand after the epidemic is over …”
According to the press release, the two seek investors through the same gimmicks of marketing- “Dark/Gray Market Participants” in their user base.The screenshot of the marketing materials lists the “limited market” as the target group, as well as online gambling and asset protection.
Wednesday’s arrest operation is just as the US Department of Justice is about to be tried on the developer and co -founder of the cryptocurrency hybrid service TORNADO CASH.The US Department of Justice’s New York district department is tracing the case.Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice Washington Special Administrative Region has successfully charged Money laundering on Roman Sterlingov, an operator of the cryptocurrency mixture Bitcoin Fog.
