Who are Samourai Wallet’s Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill?

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—by Protos Staff

Samourai Wallet has had its website seized, its app removed from the Google App Store, and two of its lead developers — Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill — arrested.

According to a press release from the Department of Justice (DoJ), 35-year-old Rodriguez and 65-year-old Hill helped to move $100 million worth of laundered funds and facilitated over $2 billion worth of unlawful transactions.

Samourai Wallet, a cryptocurrency mixing service, was well-known in the industry for its abrasive social media presence and for flouting rules and regulations. It also welcomed Russian oligarchs to the platform when US sanctions began.

According to Rodriguez’s LinkedIn profile, he’s an Oxford graduate, and Hill says he attended the French National Conservatory of Arts. The pair are listed as directors of a now-dissolved UK company called Katana Cryptographic LTD and both claim to have held positions at a company called Consign Holdings AB.

Read more: Vitalik Buterin endorses one of North Korea’s favorite coin mixers, Railgun

What else do we know?

Last year a Toronto-based cryptocurrency investment company called Cypherpunk Holdings apparently invested over $100,000 CAD in Samourai Wallet, though how it planned to earn money on the investment is unclear. Additionally, Hill was CTO at Soie LLC, a Wyoming-based company that was “seed funding privacy projects.” The X profile for the company is simply retweets of endorsements for Samourai Wallet.

It’s also worth noting that while the ‘samouraiwallet dot com’ website shows a seizure notice from numerous governmental agencies, the actual domain listed by the DOJ — samouraiwallet dot io — doesn’t have a seizure notice and is simply a broken link.

This may have to do with the fact that the US almost exclusively seizes dot com, dot net, and dot org domains.

Additionally, other services created by the developers at Samourai, such as its blockchain explorer OXT, are still up and running.

Rodriguez and Hill face two charges, one for conspiracy to commit money laundering (which carries a possible 20-year sentence) and another charge for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. This carries a possible five-year sentence.

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