Founders of Samourai Wallet cryptocurrency mixing service plead guilty

Date: August 6, 2025

Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov

Attorney for the United States, Acting Under Authority Conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 515, Nicolas Roos; Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office of Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), Harry T. Chavis, Jr.; and Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), Christopher G. Raia, announced today the guilty pleas of Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, the co-founders of Samourai Wallet (“Samourai”), a cryptocurrency mixer that facilitated more than $200 million in illegal transactions. Rodriguez, the Chief Executive Officer of Samourai, and Hill, the Chief Technology Officer, pled guilty to participating in a conspiracy to operate a money transmitting business that transmitted crime proceeds from, among other things, illegal dark web markets, cyber intrusions, a spear phishing scheme, and schemes to defraud multiple decentralized finance protocols. Rodriguez and Hill pled guilty on July 30, 2025, before U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote.

“The defendants created and operated a cryptocurrency mixing service that they knew enabled criminals to wash millions in dirty money, including proceeds from cryptocurrency thefts, drug trafficking operations, and fraud schemes,” said Attorney for the United States Nicolas Roos. “When criminals exploit cryptocurrency technology for illicit purposes, it undermines the public trust and unfairly burdens legitimate cryptocurrency companies that are committed to operating lawfully. This Office and our partner agencies are committed to holding accountable those who exploit emerging technologies to launder crime proceeds.”

“Rodriguez and Hill admitted to operating a money transmitting business that transmitted crime proceeds, essentially ‘washing’ more than $200 million in ‘dirty’ money for criminals,” said Special Agent in Charge of IRS-CI, Harry T. Chavis, Jr. “They did not just facilitate this illicit movement of money, but also encouraged it. Special Agents with IRS-CI New York and IRS-CI LA’s Cyber units worked with our federal and international law enforcement partners in this investigation that detailed the company’s clear disregard for the rule of law. Even with all the ‘washing’ in this scheme, no one was clean in these transactions.”

“Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill's guilty pleas prove their cryptocurrency mixing service–Samourai Wallet–was designed to conceal criminal financial transactions and launder millions of dollars of dirty money,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge Christopher G. Raia. “The FBI is committed to bringing to justice anyone who uses technological innovation to facilitate illicit activity.”

According to court documents and admissions:

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 proved considerable: from Ricochet’s launch in 2017 and Whirlpool’s inception in 2019, more than 80,000 Bitcoin—valued at over $2 billion when calculated using contemporaneous exchange rates—passed through these services. Samourai collected a fee for both services, estimated to be over $6 million in revenue based on Bitcoin’s value at the time each fee was earned.

Rodriguez and Hill actively promoted Samourai’s utility for concealing criminal proceeds. Their communications reveal a clear understanding of Samourai’s illegal applications. In a WhatsApp exchange, when asked to explain the concept of “mixing,” Rodriguez described the process as “money laundering for bitcoin.” Hill similarly 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.” The defendant’s own marketing materials acknowledged that customers would include “Dark/Grey Market participants” moving proceeds from “illicit activity.”

The defendants’ conduct extended beyond passive facilitation to active encouragement of criminal activity. In June and July 2020, Rodriguez and Hill tracked in real time the flow of crime proceeds from a widely publicized hack of a prominent social media platform. Rather than reporting the criminal activity or attempting to stop it, both defendants publicly and privately expressed their intent and desire that the hackers use Samourai’s Whirlpool service to move the crime proceeds of the hack. That encouragement included a July 16, 2020 Twitter exchange: after a third party encouraged the “lovely hackers” of the social media platform to “use @SamouraiWallet whirlpool to mix out once you are done collecting or decide to take profits” in order to “protect you from being found,” Rodriguez responded by personally encouraging the hackers to “feed” and “send” the crime proceeds into Samourai’s Whirlpool. When the hackers used a different cryptocurrency mixing service to launder the proceeds of the hack, Rodriguez and Hill expressed their disappointment on social media.

Rodriguez, of Harmony, Pennsylvania, and Hill, a U.S. national who was arrested in Portugal, each pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to operate a money transmitting business knowing the business transmitted crime proceeds, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. As part of their plea agreements with the Government, Rodriguez and Hill agreed to forfeit $237,832,360.55.

The maximum potential sentence in this case is prescribed by Congress and provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendants will be determined by the judge.

Mr. Roos praised the investigative work of IRS-CI and the 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 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.

IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) is the law enforcement arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 19 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.