Tornado Cash money launderer tells jury how he pulled off a $1M NFT scam at age 20

Business Insider

16-07-2025

A federal jury glimpsed the haphazard, emoji-bedecked world of a 20-year-old NFT scammer on Wednesday during testimony at the Tornado Cash money-laundering trial in Manhattan.
Convicted fraudster Andre Marcus Quiddaoen Llacuna, now 23, spent the afternoon testifying against Tornado Cash cofounder Roman Storm, who prosecutors say got rich running a "giant washing machine" that laundered more than a billion dollars in dirty crypto.
Llacuna told the jury he found out about Tornado Cash on Reddit, and that his girlfriend made fun of him because he kept calling it "Tornado Shark" by mistake.
"It was the best option to hide the money — and get away with it," Llacuna said of the so-called cryptocurrency "mixing" tool. Tornado Cash lets users deposit and then withdraw crypto from a shared pool, obscuring their identities on both ends.
"Washy washy," Llacuna said he joked to his girlfriend in January 2022, after she sent him a soap emoji in response to his news — he had just transferred $1 million in "ETH," or Ethereum blockchain-based crypto, into the Tornado Cash app.
"And when you said 'washy washy,' what were you referring to?" Nathan Rehn, an assistant US attorney, asked.
"I was referring to us cleaning the money," the young scammer answered.
When Rehn asked, "How did you clean the money?" Llacuna answered, "By using Tornado Cash."
The prosecutor quickly told US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla, "Nothing further, your honor."
Llacuna, of Arcadia, California, testified against Storm under a government cooperation agreement, in hopes, he said, of leniency when he is sentenced in his own Manhattan money-laundering case.
He testified that the crypto he dumped into Tornado Cash — and then anonymously withdrew days later — was the proceeds from selling 8,888 worthless NFTs called "Frosties.".
Llacuna and a codefendant, who has also pleaded guilty, promised investors these "Frosties" — which sold for .04 ETH or around $200 to $300 — would be featured in a game they were developing.
Investors were also told they could "breed" their Frosties if they liked. "If you purchased two or more Frosties, you could manufacture a miniature Frostie and get that for free," he said investors were told.
But as soon as the offering of 8,888 Frosties NFTs sold out, Llacuna and his friend — who was also 20 — executed what's called a "rug pull."
They took down the Frosties webpage and its Twitter and Discord accounts and vanished, rendering Frosties essentially valueless, he testified.
"Obviously, there was a negative reaction," he told the jury.
Llacuna, who told the jury he became interested in crypto in Middle School and is now working as a hairstylist, is the fifth government witness to testify against Storm.
The Russian expat faces more than 40 years in prison if convicted of conspiring to launder money, to run an unlicensed money-transfer company, and to violate federal sanctions.
Prosecutors say Storm made millions by knowingly helping crypto scammers and hackers hide their criminal proceeds. His customers, they say, included North Korea-backed hackers who used Tornado Cash to launder hundreds of millions of stolen crypto, including from the notorious $600 million "Ronin" heist in 2021.
Storm and his lawyers counter that all he did was write a successful software program that helps users achieve financial privacy.
If hackers and scammers use the program to launder money, "there's nothing Roman can do" to stop them or return the money to victims, defense attorney Keri Curtis Axel told the jury in opening statements on Monday.
In the trial's first three days of testimony, the jury has also heard from a Chinese-language court interpreter from Georgia who lost her $250,000 life savings to a crypto scammer she met online.
She testified Wednesday that a private investigator tracked $150,000 of the money to Tornado Cash. But when she sent an email to customer service at [e-mail]," she received no response.
That witness, Hanfeng Lin, was one of two hacking victims who told jurors they watched their money disappear into Tornado Cash — and got very little satisfaction when they reached out to complain.
Attorney Joseph B. Evans said he represented BitMart, a crypto exchange that lost $196 million to hackers in December 2021.
Evans testified he sent a letter addressed "Dear Tornado Cash" to Storm directly, laying out details of an internal investigation that tracked the hacked funds there. He asked Storm to freeze the assets and preserve the transaction data.
Instead of help, he got a dismissive letter and zero help, he told the jury. The letter said Tornado Cash was a program that "no entity can control."
"Our company does not have any ability to effect any change or take any action," Evans said the reply read.
"It is a decentralized software program that no entity can control," it read, according to Evans. "For that reason, we are unable to assist with respect to any issues with respect to the Tornado Cash protocol."
The trial is expected to last about a month.