Co-founder and developer of crypto mixer Tornado Cash has filed a motion to have the US government’s lawsuit against him dismissed.
Last year, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) accused Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, another founder, of helping the North Korean hacking group Lazarus launder illegal money through the Tornado Cash mixing service.
Lawyers for Storm say in a new lawsuit that the developer simply created decentralized software solutions to “provide financial privacy to legitimate cryptocurrency users,” which is not a crime.
Storm’s attorneys say the money laundering charge is “fatally flawed” and should be dismissed under the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure.
“Money laundering requires a ‘financial transaction’ involving a ‘financial institution,’ but Tornado Cash’s publicly available protocol and supposedly related software services, even as wrongly characterized in the indictment, do not conduct and qualify financial transactions they also do not qualify as financial institutions as a matter of law. Furthermore, the indictment fails to allege facts that would demonstrate that Mr. Storm entered into a conspiratorial agreement with a bad actor to launder money, or that he had the specific intent to launder money (nor could he ).
In fact, the indictment itself makes clear that he could not have had any such agreement or intent, because the Tornado Cash Protocol was developed and became immutable before the alleged criminal conduct at the center of the money laundering count even occurred .
Storm was released on bail last year and at the time, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the developers deliberately helped criminals launder and hide money with Tornado Cash.
“As alleged in the indictment, the defendants executed a $1 billion scheme designed to assist other criminals in laundering and concealing funds using cryptocurrency, including by laundering hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of a state-sponsored sponsored North Korean cybercrime group sanctioned by the US government. .
These accusations should serve as yet another warning to those who think they can turn to cryptocurrency to hide their crimes and conceal their identities, including cryptocurrency mixers: it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your plan is or how many attempts you have done to anonymize yourself, The DOJ will find you and hold you accountable for your crimes.”
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