Attorney for the United States, Nicolas Roos, announced that Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, co-founders of the cryptocurrency mixing service Samourai Wallet, have been sentenced to five and four years in prison respectively. The two were convicted for operating a money transmitting business that knowingly processed criminal proceeds totaling over $237 million. These proceeds originated from activities such as drug trafficking, darknet marketplaces, cyber-intrusions, frauds, transactions with sanctioned jurisdictions, murder-for-hire schemes, and a child pornography website. 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.”
Court documents indicate that starting around 2015, Rodriguez and Hill developed Samourai Wallet as a mobile application aimed at transmitting criminal proceeds. The app included features designed to obscure illicit transactions: “Whirlpool,” a Bitcoin mixing service launched in 2019 which allowed users to conceal the origins of their Bitcoin through coordinated exchanges; and “Ricochet,” introduced in 2017 to add unnecessary intermediary steps between sending and receiving addresses. This made it more difficult for law enforcement agencies and monitoring entities to trace transactions back to their source.
Through these services—used by more than 80,000 Bitcoin worth over $2 billion at the time—Samourai collected fees estimated at more than $6 million.
Evidence presented showed Rodriguez and Hill promoted Samourai specifically within criminal communities. Hill advertised Samourai’s ability to “clean dirty BTC” on Dread—a darknet forum focused on illegal marketplace activity—and advised users seeking untraceable methods for laundering cryptocurrency that “Samourai Whirlpool is a much better option.” In another instance from July 2020 on Twitter, Rodriguez encouraged hackers involved in a social media breach to use Samourai’s services; both he and Hill later expressed disappointment when those hackers chose another mixing service instead.
Both founders acknowledged internally that Samourai was being used for money laundering purposes. In WhatsApp messages obtained during investigation, Rodriguez described “mixing” as “money laundering for bitcoin.” Marketing materials produced by the company admitted customers would include participants moving illicit funds.
In addition to prison time, both men were sentenced to three years supervised release and ordered each to pay a $250,000 fine. They also paid over $6 million in forfeiture—the value of fees earned by Samourai—in satisfaction of an order forfeiting approximately $237 million in traceable criminal proceeds handled by their platform.
The investigation was conducted with support from Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs (OIA), Europol, Portuguese Judicial Police, Procuradoria-Geral da República (Portugal), Icelandic Police and FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office. The OIA played a key role securing Hill’s extradition from Portugal in July 2024.
The prosecution was managed by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew K. Chan, David R. Felton and Cecilia Vogel from the Complex Frauds & Cybercrime Unit as well as Illicit Finance & Money Laundering Unit.
