Programmer Alexey Pertsev received 5 years in prison in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, a panel of judges found Russian citizen, young programmer Alexey Pertsev guilty of money laundering in the amount of $1.2 billion. He was sentenced to five years and four months in prison, reported Wired edition.

Pertsev created the Tornado Cash service to anonymize cryptocurrency transactions. The judges decided that this enabled the financing of criminal activities, including terrorism. Pertsev did not admit his responsibility for who uses the Tornado Cash service and how.

Alexey Pertsev was taken into custody in August 2022. The US Treasury Department has imposed sanctions against the Tornado Cash service.

In April 2023, Pertsev’s prison sentence was commuted to house arrest. He also received permission to use the Internet.

Some publications drew attention to the fact that the St. Petersburg company Digital Security, where the Russian worked in 2017, came under US sanctions for “developing a project for the FSB.” Others claimed that Tornado Cash helped them securely provide financial support to the Ukrainian army.

Charges brought against Pertsev outraged Some of his fellow programmers, who are confident that open source creators cannot be punished for the actions of users, draw the attention of Mediazona

Money laundering activity, the Dutch prosecutor said, accounted for more than 30 percent of funds passed through Tornado Cash between 2019 and 2022.

The prosecution stated that Pertsev deliberately averted his eyes, inactive while the tool he created was used by criminal elements. “Pertsev was not blind, he was well aware of what was happening, but chose not to interfere,” prosecutors stated in the text of the indictment.