Bitcoin Mixer Founders May Get Reprieve as DOJ Weighs Dropping Case

The builders behind banned Bitcoin mixing app Samourai Pockets are hoping their case will get dropped, given the brand new crypto-friendly president within the White Home. 

A Monday letter from the Samourai Pockets co-founders’ authorized group and prosecutors requested a court docket for a 16-day extension as prosecutors take into account dropping the case.

The letter comes after the defendants within the case earlier this month wrote to the U.S. lawyer for the Southern District of New York asking for the case to be dropped following the disbandment of the U.S. Division of Justice’s crypto-dedicated enforcement group. 

The DOJ mentioned it will now not pursue legal prices towards crypto exchanges, crypto mixing providers, or holders of chilly wallets—until they’re concerned in embezzlement, scams, rug pulls and hacks. 

Samourai Pockets was a pockets with a bitcoin mixing service—an app permitting folks to cover earlier crypto transactions—that the feds shut down final yr. Police in April 2024 arrested Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill and seized the web site. 

However the case has obtained much less consideration than that of Twister Money—an Ethereum mixing supplier shuttered by U.S. authorities. 



Feds banned People from utilizing Twister Money in 2022, saying that criminals had used it to launder soiled cash. 

They then alleged that the app’s co-founders, Roman Storm and his colleague Roman Semenov, laundered greater than $1 billion in legal proceeds.

In response, America’s largest crypto change, Coinbase, bankrolled a lawsuit arguing that the sanctioning of Twister Money was unjust. Privateness advocating politicians spoke in regards to the case steadily, claiming that the app’s blacklisting was an assault on civil liberties. 

The US Treasury final month mentioned it had delisted Twister Money from its checklist of events sanctioned by the Workplace of Overseas Belongings Management, and a federal court docket on Monday completely barred the physique from reimposing sanctions on it. 

Since U.S. President Donald Trump took workplace in January, the DOJ and U.S. Securities and Alternate Fee has dropped a lot of high-profile circumstances towards crypto companies. Trump campaigned on a platform to assist the business and obtained backing from crypto and Silicon Valley bigwigs. 

Decrypt reached out to Rodriguez and Hill’s authorized group for remark. 

Edited by James Rubin