In the U.S., a court has sentenced the co-founders of the cryptocurrency wallet Samourai Wallet, Keonn Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, to several years in prison for facilitating money laundering through an illegal payment service.
This is reported by Finway
Prison Sentences and Financial Penalties
Keonn Rodriguez received a five-year prison sentence, while William Lonergan Hill was sentenced to four years. The verdict was delivered by Judge Denise Cote: Rodriguez was sentenced on November 6, 2025, and Hill on November 19. In addition to their prison terms, both were given three years of supervised release after their sentences and a fine of $250,000 each. Furthermore, they have already paid $6.37 million as part of a forfeiture that is part of a total amount of $237.8 million ordered to be forfeited as criminal proceeds.
It is worth noting that in April 2024, both co-founders were arrested on charges of laundering over $100 million and conducting illegal transactions totaling more than $2 billion. In July, Hill was released on a $1 million bail.
Activities of Samourai Wallet and Their Consequences
According to prosecutors, Samourai Wallet conducted transactions totaling over $237 million related to criminal activities, including illegal drug trafficking, darknet markets, cybercrimes, fraud, sanctioned jurisdictions, murder-for-hire schemes, and websites containing child pornography.
“The sentences received by the defendants send a clear message that laundering known criminal proceeds—regardless of the technology used and whether those proceeds are in the form of fiat currency or cryptocurrency—will have serious consequences,” said Rus.
The Samourai Wallet service existed as a mobile application with two main tools to complicate the tracking of transactions. The first was Whirlpool, a mixer for group mixing operations that “reset” the origin chain of bitcoins. The second was Ricochet, a service for artificial intermediary transactions (“hops”) that complicated the identification of the source of funds. Since the launch of Ricochet in 2017 and Whirlpool in 2019, over 80,000 BTC, valued at over $2 billion at the time, have passed through these tools. The service itself earned over $6 million in fees.
Investigators found that Hill advertised Samourai Wallet on the darknet forum Dread as a service for “cleaning dirty bitcoins,” while Rodriguez urged hackers on social media to use Whirlpool for laundering stolen funds. In internal communications, Rodriguez explicitly referred to mixing as “money laundering using bitcoins.”
In July 2025, Rodriguez and Hill pleaded guilty in a plea agreement with prosecutors, allowing them to avoid the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. They agreed to forfeit $238 million. At the end of October, the prosecution filed a memorandum requesting a five-year sentence for both defendants, which led to the issuance of the sentences.