AI Summary
5 min readIn April 2024, Lauren Rodriguez's home in Pittsburgh was raided at 5 a.m. by the FBI and IRS. Laser sights trained on her and her husband Keone Rodriguez, they were handcuffed and separated as 40 agents in tactical gear cleared their small cottage with a drone. Keone, co-founder of the Bitcoin wallet Samurai, was arrested on charges from the Southern District of New York (SDNY): conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money services business (MSB) and conspiracy to money launder. His co-founder Bill Hill faced a coordinated raid in Portugal. This marked their first law enforcement contact after nearly a decade of operation.
Samurai Wallet's Design and Operation
Samurai Wallet launched in 2015, built by cypherpunks Keone Rodriguez and Bill Hill to emphasize Bitcoin's censorship resistance amid a shift toward user-friendly wallets. It was non-custodial—users retained control of their keys—and included privacy tools like integrated Tor, PayNym, Stonewall, and CoinJoin via Whirlpool, which mixed user funds to obscure transaction histories. Ricochet added internal hops to further separate inputs from outputs.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Lauren Rodriguez**
- 2 (01:47) **Samurai Wallet Overview**
- 3 (04:15) **FBI Raid on Home**
- 4 (07:36) **Arraignment and Charges**
- 5 (13:01) **Early Legal Confidence**
- 6 (16:33) **Discovery and Court Hearings**
- 7 (21:42) **Judge Recusal and Motions Denied**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
At 5am, Lauren Rodriguez woke to laser sights, a drone flying through her house, and 40 armed federal agents raiding their cottage, all because her husband built a Bitcoin wallet.
Keonne Rodriguez co-founded Samurai Wallet in 2015, a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with privacy features including Whirlpool, their CoinJoin implementation. For nearly a decade, the wallet operated openly on the Google Play Store with no issues. Then on April 24th, 2024, the FBI and IRS launched coordinated raids on the Rodriguez home in Pennsylvania and co-founder Bill Hill's home in Portugal.
The charges: conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money service business and conspiracy to money launder. The problem: FinCEN's own guidance stated that non-custodial wallets are not money transmitters. And six months before indictment, prosecutors asked FinCEN directly whether Samurai was a money service business, FinCEN said no. The prosecutors buried that answer, a Brady violation.
Lauren walks through the full story; the raid, the discovery process involving 17 terabytes of evidence, the sudden judicial switch from a neutral judge to a former chief of the SDNY criminal division, the five-minute hearing where every defense motion was denied without explanation, and the impossible math of a plea deal versus a 25-year trial exposure with a hostile judge.
Keonne is now serving a five-year federal prison sentence. Lauren is fighting for a presidential pardon for both Keonne and Bill.
Sign the petition and support their case at BillandKeonne.org.
THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:
FOLLOW:
Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny
Lauren Rodriguez: https://x.com/leamuirleyn
Sign the Petition & Donate: https://billandkeonne.org/
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