Tornado Cash was a 'giant washing machine' for North Korea's dirty crypto, feds tell Roman Storm jury

Business Insider

15-07-2025

Is Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm just a smart and selfless software engineer? Or is the 34-year-old Russian expat the go-to money launderer for the world's biggest scammers and hackers?
A federal jury in Manhattan heard two very different stories in opening statements Tuesday for Storm's $1 billion money laundering conspiracy trial.
Prosecutors pointed to three of the biggest crypto heists in recent years — including North Korea's $600 million hack attack on the online gaming platform Axie Infinity.
Each time, the criminals hid their stolen money by running it through Tornado Cash, prosecutor Special US Attorney Kevin Gerard Mosley told the seven-woman, five-man jury.
Storm's popular online tool "mixes" cryptocurrency, scrambling transactions to make them "basically untraceable and virtually impossible for law enforcement or anyone else to track," Mosley told the jury.
"The defendant was running and profiting from a giant washing machine for dirty money, and he knew it," the prosecutor said.
"He even marketed Tornado Cash as a washing machine," he added. "In fact," he promised jurors, "you will see a photo of the defendant wearing a T-shirt showing a washing machine with the Tornado Cash logo on it."
Prosecutors say Storm kept laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for hackers with the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group even after such transactions were banned under US and global sanctions.
"Criminals could avoid being tracked by running their money through the defendant's washing machine," Mosley said of Tornado Cash, a so-called crypto "mixing" tool that lets users deposit and withdraw crypto from a shared pool, obscuring the identities on either end of the transaction.
"It would be mixed up with other crypto," Mosley said of the hackers' criminal proceeds, "so it would come out looking clean."
Storm tried to cover his tracks after the Lazarus Group was sanctioned, the prosecutor said, by removing a single software control "switch" that could be used to shut off just one part of the washing machine.
"He did that so he could pretend the whole washing machine was out of his control," while continuing to reap millions in profits, the prosecutor said.
But in fact, Storm was still "running the whole laundromat," he added.
"He had the keys to the front door, he paid the gas and electric bills, he still said, 'We're open for business.'"
In her own opening statement, defense attorney Keri Curtis Axel countered that Storm is just a privacy advocate who wrote some very useful code.
Tornado Cash was backed by US investors, and was built for perfectly legitimate purposes, she told the jury.
"Roman had nothing to do with the hackers and scammers — he didn't want them to use Tornado Cash," she said.
"The overwhelming majority of people who used it were normal people using it for their own financial privacy, which is the purpose that Roman intended."
As for that T-shirt? The one with the Tornado Cash logo imposed over a washing machine?
"He wore it at a reputable tech conference in Boston in 2019," Axel said. "And people of the jury, I want you to keep in mind it's just a T-shirt — worn in poor taste."
"It's like a comic strip or a meme. It was joke," she said. "It was not evidence of a crime."
The trial is expected to last about a month and to feature both hackers and victims among the government's witnesses.