The founders of the Samourai Wallet (Samourai) cryptocurrency mixing service have been sent to prison for helping criminals launder over $237 million.
Samourai CEO Keonne Rodriguez was sentenced to five years in prison on November 6th, while the cryptomixer’s Chief Technology Officer William Lonergan Hill received a four-year sentence on November 19th. Both men were also sentenced to three years of supervised release and must pay $250,000 fines.
The two defendants were arrested in April 2024 and charged by the prosecutors with conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business (with a maximum sentence of 5 years) and money laundering (which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years).
They pleaded guilty in August 2025 to running the Samourai money laundering operation and agreed to forfeit $237,832,360.55, representing the total traceable criminal proceeds linked to Samourai transactions.
On the day they were apprehended, Icelandic police officers seized Samourai’s servers and domains (samourai[.]io and samouraiwallet[.]com), while Google also removed the cryptomixer’s Android mobile app from the Play Store.
While the operation leading to their arrest was still active, the Samourai Wallet mobile app was downloaded over 100,000 times, enabling additional illegal financial transactions.
As detailed in court documents, beginning in 2015, Rodriguez and Hill developed Samourai as a mobile app specifically designed to obfuscate illicit cryptocurrency transactions through two key features.
“Whirlpool” mixed Bitcoin transactions across groups of users, obscuring the source in blockchain records and preventing law enforcement from tracing funds, while “Ricochet” added unnecessary intermediate transactions (called “hops”), making it substantially more difficult to establish connections between the transfers and criminal activities and further concealing their illicit source.
Criminals linked to drug trafficking, darknet markets, and cybercrime used the Samourai crypto mixer to process over $2 billion in illicit funds between 2015 and February 2024.
In total, this money laundering activity allegedly earned the two founders around $4.5 million in fees collected from Whirlpool and Ricochet transactions.
“The scale of these operations was considerable: from Ricochet’s launch in 2017 and Whirlpool’s inception in 2019, more than 80,000 Bitcoin—valued at over $2 billion at the time—passed through these services,” the DOJ said on Wednesday. “Samourai collected fees for both services, estimated to have a total value of more than $6 million.”
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