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Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2 Billion of Crypto
Alexey Pertsev, cofounder of the crypto-anonymizing tool, has been sentenced to over five years behind bars.
Over the course of two days in March, the Russian national was tried on the allegation that the tool he developed had allowed criminals—among them hackers with ties to North Korea—to freely launder $1.2 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. Any product that “indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions,” wrote the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, represents a “threat to US national security.” Two days later, Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands, where he resided. Although Pertsev cannot dictate how users interact with Tornado Cash directly through the blockchain, he and the other developers were in de facto control, the prosecutors argued, because they operated the web interface through which the majority of transactions were fed.
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