Man is suspected of founding and managing a website used to launder criminal fortunes
The Judiciary Police (PJ) arrested a man in the Greater Lisbon area suspected of having founded Samourai Wallet, a website used to launder criminal fortunes, in an operation coordinated by the American authorities (FBI), it was announced this Friday.
In a statement, the PJ explains that Operation Samourai, which took place simultaneously in several countries, included house searches in the Greater Lisbon area and resulted in the arrest of the suspect, a North American with an extradition request and who was the administrator of a portfolio of cryptoassets.
Cryptoassets are digital representations of values or rights that can be transferred and stored electronically. They are based on blockchaina type of decentralized information recording technology.
According to the PJ, the North American citizen is the main suspect of a network used on a large scale for money laundering, which provided various services to its clients with the aim of laundering income from illicit activities.
The detainee has already been presented to the judicial authority for the first interrogation and will be held in preventive detention pending the extradition process.
Since the beginning of the investigation, “elements were collected and shared that link the administrators of the ‘Samourai’ cryptoasset portfolio with money laundering activities”, explains the PJ in the statement.
Of these services, he adds, ‘Whirlpool’ stands out, “a cryptocurrency mixing service that involves funds that are potentially identifiable or “contaminated” with others, in order to erase the trail and make original identification impossible, as well as their freezing by authorities.”
According to the PJ, more than a billion dollars in ‘bitcoins’ and more than 680 million dollars in ‘BTC’ were moved, used in ‘Ricochet’ transactions, a crypto exchange platform dedicated to developing solutions that allow users to invest their “crypto assets” in real time.
Part of the operation that was carried out in national territory, by the National Unit for Combating Cybercrime and Technological Crime of the PJ, which had the collaboration of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Federal Revenue Service (IRS-CI) of the USA.
The operation involved several home searches and led to the seizure of material assets of undisclosed value and a collection of databases.
