A panel of judges in the Netherlands found Russian Alexey Pertsev guilty of money laundering in the amount of $1.2 billion due to the creation of the Tornado Cash service, which allows anonymizing transactions with cryptocurrency. Wired reports this.
Pertsev was sentenced to five years and four months in prison — this is the term the prosecution requested. “Using Tornado Cash, the defendant created a shortcut to finance crime and terrorism. He chose to look away from the abuses and did not take any responsibility,” Wired quoted a translation of the court’s statement.
In August 2022, Pertsev was sent into custody, and the US Treasury imposed sanctions against Tornado Cash. Then the department claimed that $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency was laundered through the service. According to him, all the money stolen from high-profile cybercrimes in recent years was laundered through Tornado Cash, including $455 million that was withdrawn from crypto services by hackers, for example from the North Korean group Lazarus Group.
In April 2023, Alexey Pertsev was released under house arrest and allowed to use the Internet.
Some publications drew attention to the fact that the St. Petersburg company Digital Security, where the Russian worked in 2017, came under US sanctions for “developing a project for the FSB.” Others, on the contrary, said that Tornado Cash helped them safely donate to the Ukrainian army. The charges against Pertsev outraged some of his fellow programmers, who are confident that open source creators cannot be punished for the actions of users.
After » Tornado». A Russian created a service for anonymizing cryptopayments and ended up in a pre-trial detention center in the Netherlands, and his project is under US sanctions.