Samourai Wallet Developers Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Operate an Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business

Bitcoin Magazine

Samourai Wallet Developers Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Operate an Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business

Today, the founders of Samourai Wallet, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, pled guilty to the second charge in their indictment — conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business — despite having previously pled not guilty to the charge.

In back to back hearings in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) (the first for Rodriguez and the second for Hill), the two founders admitted to playing a role in the “transportation and transmission of funds derived from criminal offenses” (to cite the words of Judge Cote, the judge for the case) by operating Samourai Wallet even after knowing that illicitly-obtained funds were being moved through the mixing service.

For their guilty pleas, both Rodriguez and Hill will face a maximum prison sentence of five years, a maximum supervised release period of three years, a $250,000 fine each, and a $100 special assessment fee each.

Rodriguez and Hill are also required to pay a total of $6,367,139.69 between them to satisfy the total amount of assets they agreed to forfeit to the court: $237,832,360.32. The two founders are required to produce the approximately $6.3 million by the sentencing date — November 7, 2025 — or before November 30, 2025.

In both Rodriguez’s and Hill’s allocutions, they shared that from 2015 until 2024, they operated Samourai together, noting that the service enabled users to transfer bitcoin from their own wallets to another Bitcoin address while Samourai “obscured” (anonymized) the transaction process.

They both highlighted that, in the process of running Samourai, they came to know that some of the bitcoin moving through the service derived from criminal activity, and they kept marketing and operating the service anyway.

In Rodriguez’s hearing, Judge Cote noted a tweet from the @SamouraiWallet Twitter (now X) account that read “Welcome new Russian oligarch Samourai Wallet users”.

And in Hill’s hearing should noted another tweet from the @samouraidev Twitter account that read “Europol also highlighted Samourai Wallet as an emerging ‘top threat’…”

The Judge seemingly pointed out these tweets in effort to illustrate that not only did the Samourai developers know that criminal actors were using the service but that they seemed to take pride in it. (Some might argue that the developers were simply trolling by publishing said posts).

Judge Cote stated that she was willing to continue with existing bail conditions for Rodriguez, which included his remaining under house arrest, having internet access, and not being permitted to use cryptocurrency.

The judge altered the bail conditions for Hill, though, stipulating that he could no longer remain under house arrest in Portugal and that he would have to do so in the “Southeast district of New York.”

Andrew Chan, the member of the prosecution that was present for both hearings, brought up the fact that Hill was being monitored by a private monitoring service in Portugal, and requested that he now be monitored by pre-trial services.

Judge Cote approved this request.

Sentencing is scheduled to take place on November 7, 2025, while the defense and prosecution are expected to have all required submissions in by October 25, 2025 and October 31, 2025 respectively.

This post Samourai Wallet Developers Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Operate an Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.