PJ holds founder of cryptocurrency website in operation with FBI | Crime

The Judiciary Police (PJ) arrested, in Lisbon, a North American citizen suspected of participating in the laundering of criminal fortunes, through the site Samurai Wallet, of which he was co-founder. The man was remanded in pre-trial detention, after the first judicial interrogation, and is awaiting extradition to the United States of America (USA).

It was an operation that took place in several countries, under the coordination of the FBI, the North American federal investigation authority and which, according to the Newspaper (JN), which announced the news this Friday, had already led to the arrest, in the USA, of another co-founder of the website dedicated to cryptocurrency transactions, Keonne Rodriguez, aged 35. Now, it was the turn of William Lonergan Hill, aged 65, to be arrested in Portugal, after work carried out by the National Unit for Combating Cybercrime and Technological Crime of the PJ, with the collaboration of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Federal Revenue Service (IRS- CI) from the USA, which also involved several home searches in the Greater Lisbon area, which culminated in the “seizure of material assets of high monetary value and a collection of databases that will allow us to determine the full scope of the facts and the complete incrimination of the authors”, explains the PJ in a statement.

The operation Samourai directly targeted the company founded by the two detainees. The man who must now be extradited from Portugal to the USA, was the administrator of a crypto-asset portfolio and “is the main suspect of a network used on a large scale for money laundering, which provided various services to its clients with the with the aim of laundering income from illicit activities”, says the PJ in the statement released this Friday.

The authorities suspect that, through the company, almost two billion dollars were moved, more than one billion in bitcoins and more than 680 million in BTC, which would be “used in Ricochet transactions, a crypto-asset exchange platform, which is dedicated to developing exclusive solutions that allow users to invest their cryptographic assets in real time”, says PJ.

Among the services provided by Samourai Wallet was one called “Whirlpool”, which allowed mixing cryptocurrencies from different sources, involving “funds potentially identifiable or ‘contaminated’ with others, in order to erase the trace and make the original identification impossible, as well as its freezing by the authorities”. A lawyer heard by the JN explained that this cryptocurrencies mixing procedure makes it more difficult to identify the transactional flow, through blockchain.