The U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, has announced the sentencing of Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, co-founders of Samourai Wallet, a cryptocurrency mixing application designed specifically to hide illegal financial transactions.
Rodriguez, who served as the Chief Executive Officer, received a five-year prison sentence on November 6, 2025, while Hill, the Chief Technology Officer, was sentenced to four years on November 19, 2025.
Their criminal enterprise facilitated the laundering of over $237 million in illicit funds through their mobile application platform.
Starting around 2015, Rodriguez and Hill developed Samourai with the explicit purpose of concealing criminal proceeds.
The application’s architecture centered on two core services built specifically to obstruct law enforcement investigations and prevent financial tracing.
Over 80,000 Bitcoin, valued at more than $2 billion at the time, flowed through their services, generating approximately $6 million in fees for the operators.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York security analysts identified that the criminal proceeds originated from multiple sources including drug trafficking, darknet marketplaces, cyber-intrusions, frauds, sanctioned jurisdictions, murder-for-hire schemes, and child pornography operations.
How Samourai’s Technical Infrastructure Enabled Money Laundering
The mixing service functioned through two primary obfuscation mechanisms. The first, known as “Whirlpool,” coordinated Bitcoin exchanges among user groups, effectively scrambling the blockchain record and making fund origins virtually untraceable to law enforcement and cryptocurrency exchanges.
The second service, called “Ricochet,” inserted unnecessary intermediate transactions referred to as “hops” between sending and receiving addresses, significantly complicating the ability of monitoring entities to establish connections between transfers and criminal activities.
Beyond the technical infrastructure, Rodriguez and Hill actively promoted their service to criminal communities.
Hill marketed Samourai on Dread, a darknet forum, explicitly recommending Whirlpool as the optimal method to “clean dirty BTC.”
Similarly, Rodriguez personally encouraged social media platform hackers via Twitter to route their stolen proceeds into Samourai’s Whirlpool service in July 2020, demonstrating direct knowledge and intentional facilitation of criminal activity.
The sentencing reflects the serious consequences of operating money laundering services, regardless of the technology employed, signaling law enforcement’s commitment to pursuing cryptocurrency-based financial crime.
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