The founders of the Samourai Wallet cryptocurrency mixing service have been incarcerated for their operation, which helped criminals launder more than $237 million. Samourai CEO Keonne Rodriguez was handed a five-year prison sentence on November 6th, while the cryptomixer’s Chief Technology Officer, William Lonergan Hill, was sentenced to four years on November 19th. Both men were additionally sentenced to three years of supervised release and were ordered to pay $250,000 fines. The arrests of the two defendants took place in April 2024, when they were charged with conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and money laundering. They ultimately pleaded guilty in August 2025 to running the money laundering operation and agreed to forfeit $237,832,360.55, which was identified as the total traceable criminal proceeds from Samourai transactions.
On the same day as their apprehension, Icelandic police officers successfully seized Samourai’s servers and domain names, including samourai[.]io and samouraiwallet[.]com. Concurrently, Google took action by removing the cryptomixer’s Android mobile application from its Play Store. Despite the ongoing law enforcement operation, the Samourai Wallet mobile app had been downloaded over 100,000 times, facilitating a high volume of illegal financial activity. Court documents detailed that Rodriguez and Hill began developing Samourai in 2015 as a mobile app specifically engineered to obscure the origin of illicit cryptocurrency transactions through its two main features.
The first obfuscation tool, “Whirlpool,” worked by mixing Bitcoin transactions across large groups of users. This successfully obscured the source of the funds in blockchain records, making it extremely difficult for law enforcement to trace the flow of money. The second feature, “Ricochet,” added unnecessary intermediate transactions, often referred to as “hops,” into the transfer chain. This technical tactic made it substantially more difficult to establish definitive connections between the transfers and underlying criminal activities, further concealing the illicit source of the funds.
Over a long period, criminals involved in drug trafficking, darknet markets, and various forms of cybercrime utilized the Samourai crypto mixer to process a staggering total of over $2 billion in illicit funds, operating from 2015 until February 2024. This extensive money laundering operation generated substantial income for the two founders, who allegedly earned around $4.5 million in fees that were collected from the use of both the Whirlpool and Ricochet services.
The immense scale of the operation was highlighted by the Department of Justice, which stated, “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 further confirmed the financial benefit to the founders, adding that “Samourai collected fees for both services, estimated to have a total value of more than $6 million.”
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