Samourai Wallet: The Mixing Service That Sought Criminal Customers

The Samourai Wallet case concerned a Bitcoin mixing business whose co-founders, the chief executive and chief technology officer, pleaded guilty in 2025 to conspiring to operate a money transmitting business that knowingly handled criminal proceeds. Its services, Whirlpool and Ricochet, made the path of the money harder to follow. The operators also sought criminal customers. The Justice Department said the concealment made it harder for victims to recover stolen funds.

In its account of the indictment, public filings and statements in the criminal case, the Justice Department described a mobile application the founders began developing around 2015. The government said they designed and operated it to transmit criminal proceeds, then charged customers for the services that concealed the transactions. The business earned money from making other people’s money harder to trace.

How Whirlpool and Ricochet Moved Bitcoin

Whirlpool mixed Bitcoin exchanges among groups of users. Ricochet added intermediate transfers between a sender and a recipient. The Justice Department’s account of the criminal filings describes different methods with a common purpose: obscuring the connection between the money’s origin and where it went.

Whirlpool, introduced in 2019, coordinated batches of exchanges between Samourai users. The government described that process as obscuring the original source of particular Bitcoin holdings in the blockchain’s transaction history. Cryptocurrency exchanges and investigators trying to follow those funds faced a trail that the service had deliberately made harder to read.

Ricochet, launched in 2017, took another approach. It inserted additional transactions, known as hops, between the sending and receiving addresses. The transfers created more distance in the transaction history between the original sender and the final recipient. The government described those intermediate transactions as unnecessary and intended to make connections to illicit activity harder to establish.

Samourai collected fees for both services. That detail connects the technical design to the business: customers paid for the mixing or extra transfers. An insider who knows the service configuration, customer communications or fee records can connect what the product did to what the business sold.

The Criminal Customers Samourai Sought

Prosecutors’ account of the promotion makes the operators’ knowledge concrete. According to the Justice Department’s account of the criminal filings and court statements, the chief technology officer marketed Samourai on Dread, a darknet forum devoted to illegal marketplace activity. When a user asked how to clean illicit Bitcoin and avoid being caught, the officer recommended Whirlpool over another service.

The chief executive made a public appeal too. In July 2020, he encouraged the hackers of a social media platform to send their criminal proceeds into Whirlpool. According to the government’s account, the founders were disappointed when the hackers took their stolen money to another mixing service.

The same announcement recounts a WhatsApp exchange in which the chief executive explained mixing in his own words:

The government’s account also says the business’s marketing materials anticipated customers moving proceeds from illicit activity. The sales pitch and the private description pointed in the same direction. The people running the service understood the use they were encouraging.

That is why internal communications can carry so much of the story. Here, a forum recommendation, a public invitation and a private explanation showed how the operators spoke about the customers they wanted and the service they provided.

Criminal Money Was Paying Business

More than 80,000 Bitcoin passed through Whirlpool and Ricochet, valued at over $2 billion at the time, according to the Justice Department’s account of the criminal case. The same announcement identified over $237 million in criminal proceeds, including money from drug trafficking, darknet marketplaces, cyber-intrusions and fraud.

Samourai’s fees for the services had an estimated total value of more than $6 million. The operators were selling a service and encouraging criminals to use it.

The Business Behind the Software

Who controls a wallet’s funds and who operates a transaction service are distinct questions. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s 2019 guidance on virtual-currency business models distinguishes hosted wallets, where a provider controls customer value, from unhosted wallets, where the user controls it and interacts directly with the payment system.

The guidance also separates supplying anonymizing software from running a service that accepts and transmits funds. That distinction puts the business’s actual work at the center of the story.

In Samourai’s criminal case, the government’s account described coordinated exchanges, added transfers, service fees and promotion to criminal users. Those are concrete parts of an operating business. An employee who understands what the service controlled may have a different view from someone looking only at its public description.

The Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation’s 2024 paper, Anti-Money Laundering: Opportunities for Improvement, asks who can know about a transaction, a question that matters when the operators know more than an outsider tracing the money:

Applied to a mixing business, that question separates what an outsider can see from what the people running the service know.

Helix Built Mixing Into Darknet Withdrawals

Helix shows another connection between mixing and criminal customers. In the criminal case against its operator, who pleaded guilty to a money laundering conspiracy, the conduct included integration with darknet-market withdrawals to conceal the source, destination and ownership of funds. Samourai’s promotion and Helix’s integration show different ways a mixing business can connect itself to criminal trade: one sought the customers, the other built mixing into the route their money took.

What an Insider Can Explain

The useful account connects the service’s functions, its customers, its fees and the decisions made by the people running it. A public blockchain transaction can show a transfer while leaving the customer behind an exchange account, the person controlling a wallet or an employee’s knowledge unresolved. Exchange ledgers, wallet-control records and internal communications can supply those connections.

Samourai makes the value of that inside view unusually clear. The product account explained how the transactions became harder to follow. The promotion evidence explained why the operators wanted particular customers. Someone familiar with both sides of a similar business may recognize a relationship that a transaction diagram alone cannot show.

A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. That law concerns fraud against the government. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network runs the AML whistleblower program for information about money laundering and sanctions violations.

You Know How the Service Worked

If you saw a mixing business court criminal customers, or know what its transaction and fee records reveal, speak to one of our Whistleblower Experts about how it courted criminal money. We connect your knowledge of the service to the evidence of knowing conduct, bring in money laundering whistleblower lawyers who understand digital-asset businesses, and stand with you as we build your strongest whistleblower case.