Bitcoin Mixer Samourai Wallet suspected of laundering over 100,000 million
With stories breaking mainly in the United States, Portugal’s PJ has arrested a man in the Greater Lisbon area suspected of having co-founded Samourai Wallet – a website used to launder criminal wealth.
In a statement, the PJ explains that Operation Samourai, which took place simultaneously in several countries, included house searches in the Greater Lisbon area and resulted in the arrest of the suspect, an American with an extradition request who was the administrator of a crypto-asset portfolio.
Crypto assets are digital representations of values or rights that can be transferred and stored electronically. They are based on blockchain, a type of decentralised information recording technology, writes Lusa.
According to the PJ, the US citizen is the main suspect in a large-scale money laundering network that provided various services to its clients in order to launder the proceeds of illegal activities.
The unnamed detainee has been brought before a judge for initial questioning and will remain in pre-trial detention pending extradition proceedings.
Since the start of the investigation, evidence has been collected and shared that links the administrators of the “Samourai” crypto asset portfolio to money laundering activities, the PJ explains in its statement.
Of these services, “Whirlpool” stands out, “a cryptocurrency mixing service that involves potentially identifiable and/ or “contaminated” funds with others, in order to erase the trail and make it impossible for authorities to identify the origin and freeze them”.
According to the PJ, more than $1 billion in bitcoins and more than $680 million in BTC were used in ‘Ricochet’ transactions – a crypto-asset exchange platform dedicated to developing exclusive solutions that allow users to invest crypto-assets in real time.
Part of the operation was carried out in Portugal by the PJ’s National Unit for Combating Cybercrime and Technological Crime in collaboration with the US Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CI).
The operation involved several house searches and led to the seizure of material goods of undisclosed value and a collection of databases, concludes Lusa.
In the US, detainees were named as Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill – both credited as being Samouri ‘co-founders’.
It is William Lonergan Hill – understood to be aged 65 – who was arrested in Portugal, with the Samouri website now closed.
Source material: LUSA/ US justice department
