A Washington state man and a Russian national – co-founders of cryptocurrency giant Tornado Cash – have been charged with operating a crypto scheme that allegedly laundered money for North Korean hackers, according to a federal indictment in the Southern District Court of New York.
The unsealed indictment alleges Roman Storm, a 34-year-old from Auburn, Wash., and Roman Semenov, a 49-year-old from Russia, of using their company to launder funds in what is known as a crypto-mixer. A mixer, or tumbler, is a service that mixes different streams of potentially identifiable cryptocurrency. This improves the anonymity of transactions by making cryptocurrency harder to trace.