U.S. Charged Samourai Founders and Seized Its Servers

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Samourai Wallet co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill on April 24, 2024, charging each with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

Rodriguez, identified by prosecutors as Samourai’s chief executive, was arrested in Pennsylvania. Hill, identified as its chief technology officer, was arrested in Portugal at the United States’ request. Authorities also seized Samourai’s domain and web servers in coordination with Icelandic officials and served Google with a seizure warrant for the mobile application, ending its availability through the U.S. Google Play Store.

The operational takedown made the case immediately consequential for Bitcoin privacy infrastructure. The charges also placed a disputed legal boundary—whether developers were supplying privacy software or operating a regulated transmission service—at the center of a criminal prosecution.

What prosecutors alleged

The indictment alleged that Rodriguez and Hill developed, marketed and operated Samourai from approximately 2015 through February 2024. Its two principal paid privacy features were Whirlpool, which coordinated groups of Bitcoin transactions to make their histories harder to trace, and Ricochet, which inserted additional intermediate transactions between sending and receiving addresses.

Prosecutors alleged that more than 80,000 BTC passed through those features after Ricochet began operating around 2017 and Whirlpool around 2019. They valued that activity at more than $2 billion by applying BTC-to-dollar conversion rates at the time of each transaction. That figure was a prosecution calculation spanning several years, not Samourai’s assets, event-day transaction volume or a market valuation measured on April 24.

The government further alleged that at least $100 million in criminal proceeds moved through the services. The indictment attributed portions to sources including the Silk Road and Hydra darknet markets, phishing and server-intrusion schemes, and attacks against decentralized-finance protocols. Those amounts, origins and assertions of criminal intent were allegations presented by the government; they had not been established by a verdict on April 24.

The regulatory line behind the case

FinCEN’s May 2019 virtual-currency guidance distinguished an anonymizing service from anonymizing software. Under that guidance, a person accepting and retransmitting convertible virtual currency as an anonymizing service is a money transmitter, while a supplier merely providing anonymizing software is not. FinCEN emphasized that classification depends on the role actually performed.

The indictment adopted the service side of that distinction. It alleged that the defendants controlled Samourai’s operations, paid infrastructure expenses, collected service fees, transferred funds for the public and never registered the business with FinCEN. It also alleged that they deliberately operated without an anti-money-laundering program or customer-identification controls.

That was the prosecution’s characterization, not a general ruling that writing wallet software, creating privacy tools or maintaining self-custodial applications constituted money transmission. The case depended on alleged operational conduct, transaction handling, marketing and knowledge, rather than the existence of privacy code alone.

What April 24 established

The money-laundering conspiracy charge carried a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison, while the unlicensed-money-transmission conspiracy carried a maximum of five years. Maximum penalties did not predict any eventual sentence, and both defendants remained presumed innocent unless proved guilty.

The defensible event-day conclusion was therefore narrow but important: U.S. authorities had converted their scrutiny of Bitcoin mixing services into a cross-border criminal case and infrastructure seizure. They had not yet proved the indictment’s transaction attributions, established the defendants’ intent at trial or obtained a judicial decision defining the legal status of privacy-wallet development generally.

No cryptocurrency price or market-impact claim is supported by this reconstruction. The surviving record establishes the enforcement action and its institutional significance, not that the announcement caused a particular movement in bitcoin or other digital assets.