Samourai Wallet CTO Gets 4 Years in Prison For $2B Bitcoin Laundering Scheme

The U.S. Justice Department has secured another major conviction in its ongoing crackdown on crypto-enabled financial crime, as Samourai Wallet’s chief technology officer, William Lonergan Hill, was sentenced to four years in federal prison.

Hill was sentenced for his role in operating a Bitcoin mixing platform that authorities say processed more than $237 million in known criminal proceeds.

Hill was sentenced on November 19, just weeks after Samourai CEO Keonne Rodriguez received the maximum five-year term for the same scheme.

Court Records Show Samourai Wallet Team Promoted Mixing Tools to Hackers, Darknet Users

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, both men knowingly operated Samourai Wallet as a money-transmitting business designed to conceal illicit transactions.

The company’s two core products, the Whirlpool mixing tool and the Ricochet transaction-hopping service, processed over 80,000 Bitcoin, valued at more than $2 billion at the time of the transactions.

Prosecutors said the funds were linked to drug trafficking rings, darknet markets, cyber intrusions, fraud schemes, sanctioned jurisdictions, murder-for-hire operations, and a child pornography website.

In court filings, the DOJ said Samourai’s founders not only understood how their tools were being used but also actively encouraged criminal users to adopt them.

Hill promoted the mixer on the darknet forum Dread, assuring one user seeking to “clean dirty BTC” that Whirlpool was a superior tool for making funds untraceable.

Rodriguez was also cited for publicly urging hackers on Twitter in July 2020 to send stolen funds into Samourai’s system. In private WhatsApp messages, he described mixing as “money laundering for Bitcoin.”

Judge Denise L. Cote sentenced Rodriguez on November 6 to five years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, along with a $250,000 fine.

Hill received the same fine and supervised release conditions. Both men have already forfeited more than $6.3 million in fees earned from Samourai operations, and the DOJ said the forfeiture satisfied an order seeking over $237 million in traceable criminal proceeds.

DOJ Tightens Grip on Crypto Platforms Linked to Illicit Finance

The sentencing caps a turbulent legal process. Earlier this year, lawyers for the founders accused prosecutors of withholding FinCEN guidance stating that Samourai, as a non-custodial wallet, did not require a money transmitter license.

Prosecutors nevertheless maintained that the platform exerted “functional control” over user assets and proceeded with the case.

Rodriguez and Hill ultimately pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business after facing an initial set of charges that included money laundering and sanctions violations.

The Samourai case lands amid a wave of high-profile prosecutions targeting crypto founders and privacy tool developers.

• Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao received a four-month prison sentence in 2023 after pleading guilty to anti-money-laundering violations. He has, however, been granted a presidential pardon.

• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence, while BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed were charged for failing to implement AML controls.

• Russian operator Alexander Vinnik, Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, and the husband-and-wife duo behind the Bitfinex hack, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, have all faced major laundering charges.

• More recently, Virtual Assets LLC founder Firas Isa was indicted for allegedly running a crypto ATM network that laundered at least $10 million in fraud and drug proceeds.

The DOJ’s focus comes as new data highlights the speed and scale of crypto laundering.

A Global Ledger report found that $3 billion in digital assets were stolen in the first half of 2025 alone, with one-quarter of cases seeing funds fully laundered before any public alert.

Investigators warn that stolen assets can now move through laundering pathways in minutes, narrowing the window for recovery to near zero.

For U.S. authorities, the sentencing of Samourai’s founders is another signal that the government intends to aggressively pursue developers whose platforms become conduits for criminal finance, regardless of whether the technology is open-source or non-custodial.