Founders Of Samourai Wallet Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Sentenced To Five And Four Years In Prison

Attorney for the United States, Acting Under Authority Conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 515, Nicolas Roos announced today the sentencings of KEONNE RODRIGUEZ and WILLIAM LONERGAN HILL, the co-founders of Samourai Wallet (“Samourai”), a cryptocurrency mixer that facilitated over $237 million in illegal transactions.  RODRIGUEZ, the Chief Executive Officer of Samourai, and HILL, the Chief Technology Officer, participated in a conspiracy to operate a money transmitting business in which they knowingly transmitted criminal proceeds.  The over $237 million dollars of criminal proceeds laundered through Samourai came from, among other things, drug trafficking, darknet marketplaces, cyber-intrusions, frauds, sanctioned jurisdictions, murder-for-hire schemes, and a child pornography website.  RODRIGUEZ and HILL were respectively sentenced to five and four years in prison.  U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote sentenced RODRIGUEZ on November 6, 2025, and HILL on November 19, 2025. 

“The sentences the defendants received send a clear message that laundering known criminal proceeds—regardless of the technology used or whether the proceeds are in the form of fiat or cryptocurrency—will face serious consequences,” said Attorney for the United States Nicolas Roos.  “These sentences reflect the harmful impact that money laundering services have on victims by making it virtually impossible for victims to recover their stolen funds. Our office will continue to work tirelessly to hold accountable those who profit by helping criminals hide their criminal proceeds.”

According to the Indictment, other public filings, and statements made in court:

Beginning around 2015, RODRIGUEZ and HILL began developing Samourai, a mobile application that was designed and operated as a service for transmitting criminal proceeds.  The defendants engineered Samourai around two services specifically intended to conceal the nature of illicit transactions. The first, a Bitcoin mixing service known as “Whirlpool,” coordinated batches of Bitcoin exchanges between groups of Samourai users.  Through this process, the original source of particular Bitcoin holdings became obscured within the blockchain’s transactional record, effectively preventing law enforcement agencies and cryptocurrency exchanges from tracing funds back to their origins.  The second service, called “Ricochet,” enabled users to introduce additional and unnecessary intermediate transactions—known as “hops”—between sending and receiving addresses.  This feature served a similar obfuscation purpose, making it substantially more difficult for monitoring entities to establish connections between cryptocurrency transfers and potential illicit activities.  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.  Samourai collected fees for both services, estimated to have a total value of more than $6 million.

RODRIGUEZ and HILL actively promoted Samourai to criminal users and encouraged criminal activity.  HILL marketed Samourai as a transmittal service for criminal proceeds on Dread, a darknet forum dedicated to discussing illegal marketplace activities.  In one exchange on that platform, a user asked about the most “secure methods to clean dirty BTC” to make it “untraceable, clean” and ensure the user would “never get caught.”  HILL responded by writing that “Samourai Whirlpool is a much better option” than a competitor service to “clean dirty BTC.”  Similarly, in July 2020, RODRIGUEZ engaged in a Twitter exchange in which he personally encouraged the hackers of a social media platform to “feed” and “send” the criminal proceeds into Samourai’s Whirlpool.  When the hackers ultimately used a different cryptocurrency mixing service to launder the proceeds of the hack, RODRIGUEZ and HILL expressed their disappointment.

The defendants also had a clear understanding that Samourai was, in fact, used for money laundering.  In a WhatsApp exchange, when asked to explain the concept of “mixing,” RODRIGUEZ described the process as “money laundering for bitcoin.”  The defendant’s own marketing materials acknowledged that customers would include “Dark/Grey Market participants” moving proceeds from “illicit activity.”

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In addition to their terms of prison, RODRIGUEZ, 37, of Harmony, Pennsylvania, and HILL, 67, a U.S. national who was arrested in Portugal at the request of the United States, were each sentenced to three years of supervised release.  Judge Cote also ordered that RODRIGUEZ and HILL each pay a fine of $250,000.  RODRIGUEZ and HILL have paid a total of $6,367,139.69 in forfeiture, representing the fees Samourai earned, in satisfaction of an order to forfeit $237,832,360.55, the larger sum representing the total traceable criminal proceeds for which Samourai executed transactions. 

Mr. Roos praised the investigative work of Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”).  He also acknowledged the assistance of the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, Europol, the Portuguese Judicial Police, the Procuradoria-Geral da República, the Icelandic Police, and the FBI Field Office in Pittsburgh for their assistance in the investigation of this case.

The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided substantial assistance to secure the July 2024 extradition from Portugal of HILL.

This case is being handled by the Office’s Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit and the Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit.  Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew K. Chan, David R. Felton, and Cecilia Vogel are in charge of the prosecution.