Tornado Cash Founder Accused of Assisting in Money Laundering $1.2B: Report
Alexey Pertsev, the creator of the widely used Tornado Cash crypto mixer, has been indicted for his alleged role in helping launder approximately $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency funds, according to reports from DL News. Amid investigations into 36 suspected illicit transactions, Dutch prosecutors have targeted Pertsev for his involvement. Notably, the largest transaction listed involved 175 ETH from Axie Infinity’s crypto protocol Ronin Bridge. Other decentralized protocols such as Harmony and Nomad Bridge were also implicated. Pertsev’s lawyer, Keith Cheng, stated that the prosecutors have accused his client of money laundering without providing specific details of his alleged actions. However, Dutch authorities claim that Pertsev habitually engages in money laundering activities. This claim gains credibility considering Pertsev’s previous arrest in August 2022 by the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) of the Netherlands for allegedly laundering $7 billion in cryptocurrencies. Prior to his arrest, Tornado Cash had been sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Treasury Department for facilitating the cleaning of illicit funds amounting to billions of dollars. One of the accused organizations was the notorious North Korean Lazarus hacking group. While Pertsev was granted bail and released following his initial arrest, he was apprehended again in August of the following year on money laundering charges, this time by the FBI. His arrest coincided with the findings of crypto investigator ZachXBT, who had been monitoring a suspicious wallet linked to Tornado Cash since the beginning of 2023. Pertsev has consistently denied any involvement in money laundering or violations of money laundering securities claims since his initial arrest in 2022. The trial is set to commence on March 26 in the Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch.