The Samourai Wallet website has been seized, the app has been removed from the Google App Store, and the two key developers, Keonn Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, have been arrested.
According to a press release from the U. S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Rodriguez, 35, and Hill, 65, helped launder $100 million and facilitated more than $2 billion in illegal transactions.
Samurai Wallet, a #cryptocurrency mixing service, was well known in the industry for its epathetic social media presence and breaking rules and regulations. It also hosted Russian oligarchs on its platform when the U. S. imposed sanctions on the company.
Rodriguez's LinkedIn profile states that he graduated from Oxford University, while Hill studied at the Conservatoire des Arts de France. Both are listed as directors of the now-disbanded British companies Katana Cryptographic LTD, Consign Holdings AB, and also claim to have held positions in a company called Holdings AB.
What else is known about them?
Last year, a Toronto-based cryptocurrency investment company called Cypherpunk Holdings apparently invested more than 100,000 Canadian dollars in the Samourai wallet, but it's unclear how it intended to capitalize on that investment. Hill was also the CTO of Soie LLC, a Wyoming-based company that provides "seed funding for privacy-related projects. " This company's Profile X only retweeted statements supporting Samourai's wallet.
It's also worth noting that while the domain "samouraiwallet #dot com" receives arrest notices from multiple government agencies, the actual domain listed by the DOJ (samouraiwallet dot io) contains no arrest notices and is simply an inactive #link .
This is likely due to the fact that the US almost exclusively seizes dotcom, dotnet, and dot org domains.
In addition, other services created by Samurai developers, such as the #blockchain guide OXT, are still up and running.
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