Founders of Samourai Crypto Mixer Sentenced to Prison

The founders of cryptocurrency mixer Samourai Whirlpool and the Samourai Wallet application have been sentenced to prison after US authorities determined the service facilitated the laundering of over $237 million in criminal proceeds.

The Arrests and Charges

Samourai founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill were arrested on April 24, 2024, and charged with operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and money laundering.

The indictment alleged that between 2015 and February 2024, Rodriguez and Hill used the Whirlpool crypto mixer to process over $2 billion in illegal transactions, facilitating the laundering of more than $100 million in criminal funds.

In August 2025, both defendants pleaded guilty and agreed to forfeit $237,832,360—the total amount of criminal proceeds laundered through Samourai.

How Samourai Operated

Since 2015, Rodriguez and Hill developed Samourai as a mobile application designed to obscure illegal cryptocurrency transactions. The service offered two primary features:

Whirlpool: Mixed Bitcoin transactions among groups of users, obscuring the source on the blockchain and hindering law enforcement's ability to trace funds.

Ricochet: Added unnecessary intermediate transactions ("hops") to make it difficult to establish connections between transfers and criminal activity.

Per the investigation, from Ricochet's launch in 2017 and Whirlpool's introduction in 2019, over 80,000 bitcoins—worth more than $2 billion at prevailing exchange rates—passed through Samourai. Transaction fees generated approximately $4.5 to $6 million for the founders.

Service Shutdown

Before the founders' arrests, the Samourai Wallet mobile application had accumulated over 100,000 downloads. Following Rodriguez and Hill's detention, Icelandic police seized the service's servers and domains, and Google removed the application from the Play Store.

Sentencing

According to the US Department of Justice, Samourai CEO Keonne Rodriguez was sentenced in November to five years in prison, while CTO William Lonergan Hill received a four-year sentence. Following their release, both will serve three years of supervised release and pay fines of $250,000 each.