Netherlands indictment alleges Alexey Pertsev aided in laundering $1.2 billion through Tornado Cash: report

Companies • March 19, 2024, 5:03PM EDT

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Quick Take

Authorities in the Netherlands indicted Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, claiming he helped launder over a billion in illicit funds through the crypto mixer.
Pertsev awaits trial for charges related to money laundering and other financial crimes on March 26 in the Netherlands.

Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was accused of laundering $1.2 billion of illegal funds through the platform, according to an indictment in the Netherlands obtained by DL News.

The indictment alleges that Pertsev was involved in money laundering on Tornado Cash and cited 36 transactions on the platform that it alleges were illegal. One such transaction was of 175 ETH purportedly derived from the Ronin Bridge hack, in which the blockchain popularized by the web3 game Axie Infinity lost 173,600 ETH among other assets in an exploit worth a total of $590 million in March 2022.

Pertsev awaits trial in the Netherlands on March 26 for charges related to money laundering and other financial crimes.

Pertsev was initially arrested in August 2022. At the time, authorities in the Netherlands said that at least $1 billion of criminally derived cryptocurrencies passed through Tornado Cash, whose team members profited from the transactions, The Block previously reported. Tornado Cash is a crypto mixer that facilitates private on-chain transactions by taking numerous transactions, pooling funds together and then doling out the money to hide their origin.

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About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.