Founders of the "Samourai wallet" arrested

A central accusation against Samourai Wallet is that the service knowingly facilitated criminal activities or even recruited users to do so.

While the defendants offered Samourai as a privacy protection service, they knew that it was a haven for criminals engaged in large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion.
_{From the press release}

To back up the statement, the Ministry of Justice cites a tweet from Samourai Wallet's official Twitter account welcoming Russian oligarchs to the service in the context of sanctions against Russia due to the war in Ukraine.

The public prosecutor's office also cites a private message allegedly written by Hill under the 𝕏-account "Samourai Dev", in which the 65-year-old Samourai founder is said to have emphasized that the service also focuses specifically on the grey and black market.

At Samourai, we focus entirely on resisting censorship and the black/gray circular economy. This means that mass adoption is not foreseeable, even though the black/grey markets have already started to expand during the corona pandemic and will continue to do so after Covid.
_{Alleged message from William Lonergan Hill}

This continues a worrying wave of attacks against Bitcoin mixing services. Just a few weeks ago, the US judicial authorities found Roman Sterlingov guilty on all charges for allegedly operating the Bitcoin Fog mixer - Blocktrainer.de reported. In August last year, the US Department of Justice also filed a lawsuit against the founders of the crypto mixer Tornado Cash. The trial against developer and co-founder Roman Storm is imminent.

And this is probably not the end of the story for the USA, as US Attorney Damian Williams emphasizes.

Together with our law enforcement partners, we will continue to relentlessly pursue and dismantle criminal organizations that use cryptocurrencies to conceal illegal activity.
_{Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney}

The Department of "Justice" has once again criminalized the developers of an app that restores financial privacy. The way to fix this it to make money private by default. Privacy must never be "exceptional," or they will make it criminal.
_{Edward Snowden}

The arrest of Hill and Rodriguez will further fuel the debate about financial privacy, both in general and specifically in the Bitcoin space. There is no question for the vast majority of people that privacy is important and not criminal per se. Other mixing services such as the "Wasabi" team are taking a different approach, for which they are often criticized by some "maximalists", but which seems all the more relevant in light of the current incidents surrounding Samourai. Roughly speaking, Wasabi uses the Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") lists to filter out potentially illegal or sanctioned players before the actual mixing process, so that only "legal participants" can protect their privacy.

The discussion about which is the right way to go, whether money must guarantee full privacy by default and how transactions to terrorist organizations or money laundering in general should be handled, for example, will probably never reach a broad consensus in the community. It remains to be seen how the developments surrounding Samourai will continue, when a possible trial will begin and, above all, what verdict will be handed down. In view of the verdict against Roman Sterlingov mentioned above, the situation for the two Samourai founders does not seem particularly rosy.