Alexey Pertsev arrested in Amsterdam two days after OFAC sanctions Tornado Cash

AUG 10 2022 · 12:20

Video: The War On Code: Investigating the Tornado Cash Sanctions and the Arrest of Alex Pertsev Date: 2022-08-10 · Type: failure · Hub: amsterdam · Tags: tornado-cash, developer-liability, privacy, amsterdam, dutch-law, money-laundering, crypto-wars, alexey-pertsev 64 months for writing a privacy protocol — the most significant prison term for code authorship since the cypherpunk wars The coordination was unmistakable. OFAC published its SDN listing on August 8 2022; the Dutch FIOD arrested Pertsev on August 10. No charges were announced at the time of arrest — Dutch law permits extended detention pending investigation — and Pertsev spent months in pre-trial custody before the case was fully articulated. His arrest transformed an administrative regulatory action into a criminal one, and the overlap made plain that this was a joint operation across the Atlantic. Pertsev was one of the primary developers of Tornado Cash, the Ethereum-based coin mixer that had processed over $7 billion in transactions since its 2019 launch. His defense throughout the Dutch proceedings rested on arguments familiar from the 1990s: that writing and deploying code is a form of expression, that developers cannot be held criminally responsible for how third parties use their tools, and that Tornado Cash's privacy function was legitimate for the majority of users with no criminal intent. The Dutch court was unpersuaded. Its May 2024 verdict found that Pertsev had operated a money-laundering service and sentenced him to 64 months — more than five years. The sentence landed with particular weight because it was delivered not by an American court navigating First Amendment terrain but by a Dutch one, under European legal frameworks where the code-as-speech doctrine has less purchase. Tim May's 1988 specter — a state haunted by cryptographic tools beyond its control — had, by this account, begun to fight back. Pertsev's conviction sits alongside the Samourai and Storm cases as one node in a deliberate prosecutorial strategy against privacy-infrastructure operators, a strategy that the Fifth Circuit's *Van Loon* ruling and OFAC's subsequent delisting have complicated but not reversed at the criminal level. Facts • Arrested: August 10 2022, Amsterdam, by Dutch FIOD (Financial Intelligence and Investigation Service) • Held in pre-trial detention for months before formal charges were specified • Tornado Cash processed over $7 billion in transactions since 2019 launch • Dutch court verdict: May 14 2024, guilty of money laundering • Sentence: 64 months (5 years, 4 months) • OFAC delisted Tornado Cash March 21 2025 — does not affect Dutch criminal proceedings • Co-developers Roman Storm and Roman Semenov indicted separately in S.D.N.Y. Primary Documents • OFAC press release on Tornado Cash sanctions (Aug 8 2022) — https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916 • DOJ indictment: United States v. Storm and Semenov (S.D.N.Y. Aug 23 2023) — https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tornado-cash-founders-charged-money-laundering-and-sanctions-violations