In 2023, the United States Department of Justice charged storm With three violations: conspiracy to commit recycling money, conspiracy to violate the penalties and conspiracy to manage a money transmission activity without license.
On Wednesday, at the end of a process of four weeks and a period of resolution that lasts five days, the jury returned a partial verdict: he believed that the storm guilty of having managed an activity of transmission of money without a license and not guilty of evasion of the sanctions. He was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on counting money laundering, which leads to Much greater penalty a maximum of 20 years in prison.
“We are grateful that the jury has not condemned Roman for violating penalties or money laundering. There are serious legal problems with the only remaining count that involves the transmission of money without a license,” says Brian Klein, partner of the Waymaker law firm, one of Storm’s representatives during the trial. “We will not stop fighting for Roman and we expect it to be completely claimed.”
Storm intends to submit the application for the single sentence to be rejected in a post-process motion, his lawyer says to Wired.
Tornado Cash was developed in 2019 by Storm and two others, Alexey Pertsev and Roman Senov. The idea was to hide the property of the cryptocurrency coins, putting in common funds belonging to various different parts, then giving them in mint wallets, thus interrupting the wake of the public transactions recorded on a blockchain.
Services such as Tornado Cash are marketed as essential to improve the level of privacy available for cryptocurrency owners. Privacy has long been a concern among cryptographic ideologists, but the question is currently particularly relevant, after a series of violent kidnappings aimed at people known to have large quantities of cryptocurrencies.
“Privacy is a very pragmatic thing for basic security,” said Wired Wired before the start of the Vitalik Boterin process, co-creator of Ethereum Crypto Network, before the start of the process. “If someone knows who coins, someone knows who to aim.”
But the United States government has seen the tornado in cash differently, as a vehicle tailored for money recycling. When he brought accusations in 2023, the Doj claimed that Storm had built and taken advantage of a tool that allowed criminals to recycle at least $ 1 billion in cryptocurrency, including hackers with ties with North Korea.
“Saying to offer the cash service of Tornado as a” privacy service “, in reality the defendants knew that it was a paradise for criminals engaged in recycling of large -scale money and evasion sanctions,” said the accusation.
At the trial, public ministries presented evidence of the fact that they claimed that Tornado’s money was designed for money recycling from the beginning. Their witnesses included a victim of scam whose steps stolen were said to have passed through the tornado money, even if this account was contested online As a prominent members of the cryptocurrency sector and a condemned scammer who used the service to recycle poor wealthy earnings. “WASHY, WASY”, the scammer presumably wrote To his girlfriend, in a message on Tornado Cash.