Tornado Cash Developer Alexey Pertsev Found Guilty of Money Laundering

Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev has been found guilty of money laundering by a Dutch judge ruled at s-Hertogenbosch court on Tuesday.

An indictment shared ahead of the trial said that between July 9, 2019 and Aug. 10, 2022, Pertsev made “a habit of committing money laundering” and that he should have at least suspected the criminal origins of illicit transactions on the Tornado Cash platform.

The developer was first jailed in the Netherlands in August 2022 after Tornado Cash was blacklisted by the U.S government. At the time, the U.S. Treasury had alleged that Tornado Cash was a key tool for the North Korean hacking group Lazarus. The Lazarus Group has been tied to a $625 million hack of Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network and other major crypto thefts.

The trial result could decide on future trials of other Tornado Cash developers. Other developers of the crypto mixer, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, also face allegations of money laundering and sanctions violations in the U.S. Storm will go to trial this September, but Semenov has not yet been arrested. Storm was arrested last year, after the U.S. again added Tornado Cash to its sanctions watchlist.

In the U.S., however, Storm is not accused of being responsible for the laundering of $1.2 billion due to differences in how U.S. and Dutch laws address personal responsibility in this type of alleged crime.

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