Samourai Wallet Founders Sentenced for Laundering $237 Million

The co-founders of the Samourai Wallet cryptocurrency-mixer service have been sentenced to prison for laundering more than $237 million in illicit funds. One of them, Keonne Rodriguez (CEO), received five years, while William Lonergan Hill (CTO) was sentenced to four years. They will also face three years of supervised release and were fined $250,000 each.

They pleaded guilty earlier in 2025 to charges related to running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. As part of their plea deal, they agreed to forfeit $237,832,360.55, the total amount of the criminal proceeds traced through their service.

Samourai Wallet offered two core mixing features:

• Whirlpool, which blended Bitcoin transactions among users to make them harder to trace.
• Ricochet, which added extra “hops” or intermediate steps in transfers to further obscure transaction history.

Prosecutors said that from its inception until February 2024, over 80,000 BTC—worth more than $2 billion at the time—flowed through Samourai’s mixing services. These funds came from criminal sources such as darknet markets, drug trafficking, cybercrime, fraud, and even murder-for-hire schemes.

The founders earned roughly $4.5 million in fees from their “mixing” services. They were aware of the illicit use: court documents show they promoted the service to criminals. At one point, Rodriguez described the mixing process as “money laundering for bitcoin.”

When law enforcement shut things down, servers and domains for Samourai were seized and their mobile app removed from the Play Store.