Tornado Cash Developer sentenced to 64 months in Prison for Laundering $1.2 Billion Crypto
Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev has been sentenced to 64 months in prison for money laundering charges. A three-judge Dutch-Hertogenbosch court convicted the 31-year-old Russian national living in the Netherlands on Tuesday of laundering $1.2 billion in illicit assets on the crypto mixer’s platform.
Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev is found guilty by Dutch judges, and is due 64 months in prison - hearing is still ongoing.
— Inbar Preiss (@InbarPreiss) May 14, 2024
According to a report by DLNews, the panel granted the prosecution's request and sentenced Pertsev to five years and four months in prison. From the bench, one of the judges overseeing the case said, "Tornado Cash is a tool intended for criminals in its nature and operation."
Pertsev's defense attorney, Keith Cheng, stated during the trial that users were free to use the open-source smart contract code however they pleased. Additionally, unlike traditional companies, contributors were established as a decentralized organization with no single point of control. But prosecutors rejected the idea.
The notion that Tornado Cash operated without leadership was untrue, according to public prosecutor Martine Boerlage. The prosecutor argued at the trial that "Tornado Cash is more than just smart contracts. It was conducted like a company." And according to the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, that business was used to launder cryptocurrency from hacks and heists totaling over $7 billion.
After the verdict, two police officers escorted Pertsev out of the side door of the courtroom. Pertsev’s lawyers will have 14 days to file an appeal against the judges' ruling. Since Pertsev spent eight months in jail before this arrest, he will serve four and a half years after that time is deducted from his sentence.
In an indictment released ahead of his trial on March 26, Dutch prosecutors accused Russian developer Alexey Pertsev of laundering $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency through the anonymizing tool Tornado Cash.
Pertsev allegedly "made a habit of committing money laundering" between July 9, 2019 and August 10, 2022, "at least in the Netherlands and/or in Russia and/or the United States and/or in Dubai, together and in association with one or more others, at least alone."
After Tornado Cash was placed on a government blacklist in the United States, the developer was first imprisoned in the Netherlands in August 2022. The U.S. Treasury claimed at the time that Tornado Cash was a vital instrument used by the Lazarus hacking group, a North Korean hacking group. The Lazarus Group is linked to several significant cryptocurrency thefts as well as a $625 million hack of Axie Infinity's Ronin Network.
Several people are being targeted, including Pertsev, for their part in developing Tornado Cash. In the United States, Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Roman Semenov are accused of money laundering and violating sanctions.
Semenov has not yet been taken into custody, but Storm's trial is scheduled to begin before a federal court in New York on September 23. Storm, however, is not charged with being accountable for the $1.2 billion in laundering because U.S. and Dutch laws handle personal responsibility differently in this kind of alleged crime.
In related news reported earlier by whaleinsider.news, Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao is to serve 4 months in prison.
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