Tornado Cash Co-Founder Sentenced to 5 Years and 4 Months in Prison
Alexey Pertsev, one of the developers behind the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, has been sentenced to 64 months in prison in the Netherlands for his involvement in laundering over $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency. In addition to the prison sentence, authorities plan to confiscate Pertsev’s crypto assets worth €1.9 million and a Porsche car, which has already been seized.
The 31-year-old Russian citizen was arrested in Amsterdam in August 2022 on charges of “involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering.” Around the same time, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that more than $7 billion had been laundered through Tornado Cash since its creation in 2019. OFAC stated that the operators of Tornado Cash failed or refused to implement “effective controls designed to prevent regular money laundering by bad actors.”
As a result, sanctions were imposed on the mixer service: all property and interests in property of Tornado Cash located in the U.S. or in the possession or control of U.S. persons were blocked and must be reported to OFAC. U.S. citizens and others in the United States are now prohibited from doing business with Tornado Cash without special permission from OFAC. Additionally, any organizations directly or indirectly owned 50% or more by such persons were also banned.
U.S. authorities stated that the sanctions were related to funds laundered through Tornado Cash that were stolen by hackers in incidents such as the Harmony hack (about $96 million), the compromise of the Ronin blockchain associated with the popular NFT game Axie Infinity (over $600 million stolen, with $455 million laundered through the mixer), and about $7.8 million from the Nomad crypto bridge hack.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two more Tornado Cash co-founders, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, with helping criminals—including the North Korean Lazarus Group—launder over $1 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. Storm was arrested in Washington, while Semenov was charged in absentia.
According to Dutch authorities, Pertsev, along with Semenov and Storm, was one of the three co-founders of the crypto mixer and actively participated in the project’s development from July 2019 to August 2022.
In court, Pertsev claimed he only wanted to provide privacy for the crypto community and did not break the law by supporting criminal operations. He also stated that he had no way to prevent users from abusing the platform.
However, the court rejected these arguments, stating that Tornado Cash was deliberately designed without safeguards against abuse, and the developers made no effort to prevent money laundering through the platform. The court also noted that Pertsev did not cooperate with law enforcement when approached about hacker attacks, claiming he could do nothing about it.
As a result, Dutch law enforcement reported that between $1.2 billion and $2.2 billion obtained from at least 36 different cyberattacks was laundered through Tornado Cash. The service effectively helped criminals hide their identities from authorities and made it much harder to freeze hackers’ assets.
Currently, the main Tornado Cash websites and the project’s GitHub page remain online, but the developer community’s social media pages are closed, Binance accounts are frozen, and most Remote Procedure Call (RPC) endpoints are censoring deposits (blocking transactions) due to OFAC sanctions.