Keonne Rodriguez receives the maximum sentence for operating an unlicensed money transmission service.
On November 6, Samourai Wallet CEO Keonne Rodriguez was sentenced to five years in prison for running an unlicensed money transmission business that, according to prosecutors, laundered $237 million in illicit proceeds.
The sentence was handed down by District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York during a one-hour hearing in Manhattan, as reported by Inner City Press.
Prosecutors argued that Rodriguez, together with CTO William Lonergan Hill, operated two mixing services within Samourai Wallet: Whirlpool and Ricochet. These tools were designed to obscure the origin of funds linked to drug trafficking, darknet marketplaces, computer intrusions, fraud, and murder-for-hire schemes.
Whirlpool enabled CoinJoin transactions among multiple users, while Ricochet introduced multiple intermediate transactions, known as “hops,” making the funds harder to trace. Since Ricochet’s launch in 2017 and Whirlpool’s debut in 2019, over 80,000 bitcoins — worth more than $2 billion at the time — have passed through these services, generating over $6 million in fees.
Court filings revealed that Rodriguez and Hill actively promoted Samourai Wallet’s criminal use. In intercepted WhatsApp messages, Rodriguez described the service as “money laundering for bitcoin.” Hill, for his part, promoted Whirlpool on Dread, a darknet forum, presenting it as a tool to make illicit funds “untraceable.”
Rodriguez and Hill were arrested in April 2024 on charges of money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmission business. After more than a year of legal proceedings, both pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of operating an unlicensed money transmission service, in exchange for the dismissal of the more serious money laundering conspiracy charge, which carried a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Rodriguez had requested a sentence of one year and one day, while prosecutors sought the maximum five-year term, which Judge Cote ultimately imposed. In addition to the 60-month prison sentence and $250,000 punitive fine, Rodriguez will be placed on supervised release for three years following his incarceration.
William Lonergan Hill is scheduled to be sentenced by the same judge on November 19. Hill had requested a time-served sentence, but he too could face the maximum five-year term.
