NEW YORK — The federal government formally rested its case in opposition to Twister Money developer Roman Storm on Thursday, bringing eight days of witness testimony to an in depth.
Storm’s protection launched its first witness, Ethereum core developer Preston Van Loon, on Thursday afternoon. Van Loon informed the jury that he was a person of Twister Money, describing it as a privateness instrument for Ethereum that allowed folks to separate their identities from their cash. Van Loon defined that he’d used the protocol for “operational safety and private security” to guard himself from hackers and different unknown adversaries. Van Loon — who sued the U.S. Treasury Department for sanctioning Tornado Cash and won, resulting in the sanctions being reversed — didn’t testify about his associated lawsuit, which U.S. District Choose Katherine Polk Failla banned from being discussed at trial.
Van Loon’s testimony was the primary style of Storm’s protection case, which can argue that Twister Money was in the beginning a privateness instrument that met a reputable want within the Ethereum neighborhood — and that additionally occurred to be exploited by dangerous actors. In that method, the protection has argued, Twister Money is just like an encrypted messaging app or a digital non-public community (VPN) or perhaps a hammer — which Storm’s lawyer Keri Axel, a companion at Waymaker LLP identified in her opening statements, may each be used for reputable functions in addition to breaking into a house.
The protection’s witnesses, whose testimony is anticipated to stretch over three trial days, will try to undo the portrait of Storm painted by the prosecution over the course of their case.
The prosecution’s case is, primarily, this: Roman Storm, alongside together with his colleagues and alleged co-conspirators, Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev, owned and managed Twister Money. They profited handsomely from it via their sale of TORN tokens. They knew that criminals, together with North Korean hackers, have been generally utilizing the protocol to launder funds. They made frequent modifications to the entrance finish, or person interface of Twister Money, and have been additionally thus capable of change the character of the protocol itself to make it much less enticing to criminals, however didn’t. And when victims of hacks and scams reached out to Twister Money asking for assist, Storm informed them he couldn’t do something for them, which the federal government claimed Thursday was a lie.
This, the federal government has argued, constitutes a trio of conspiracies: conspiracy to commit cash laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions evasion, and conspiracy to violate worldwide sanctions — prices for which Storm, if convicted, faces as much as 45 years in jail.
The protection, in the meantime, has maintained that Storm didn’t take part in any conspiracies as a result of he didn’t know the criminals utilizing his software program, didn’t give them the green-light to make use of it or in any other case revenue from their prison acts. At most, his legal professionals informed the choose on Thursday, he was negligent, however not criminally liable for the habits of Twister Money’s worst customers.
Professional (?) witness
By the testimony of a number of “sufferer” witnesses in addition to hack perpetrators, the prosecution informed the jury how prison proceeds flowed via Twister Money after which disappeared.
However one witness — a sufferer of a wrong-number WhatsApp rip-off named Hanfeng Lin, who misplaced $250,000 to a pig butchering operation – testified earlier in Storm’s trial {that a} crypto tracing firm known as Payback traced a portion of her cash to Twister Money. Over the weekend, nevertheless, blockchain sleuth Taylor Monahan (aka @tayvano_x) took to X to explain that Payback, and thus the federal government, had gotten the tracing incorrect. Lin’s cash, she stated, by no means went to Twister Money — a declare that different well-respected blockchain tracers, together with pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, additionally verified.
The alleged tracing error led the protection to lift the opportunity of a mistrial, or no less than the hanging of Lin’s testimony. Nonetheless, Failla dominated that one other of the prosecution’s witnesses — Inner Income Service (IRS) agent Stephan George — could be allowed to confirm that Lin’s funds certainly flowed via Twister Money, overruling the protection’s objection to George’s introduction as an knowledgeable witness.
George, a first-time knowledgeable witness, testified that he used an accounting precept known as “LIFO” (final in, first out) to hint Lin’s funds. He admitted, upon cross-examination, that the strategy of tracing doesn’t set up the possession or attribution of the wallets or funds and doesn’t show that Lin’s scammers moved her cash via Twister Money.
Throughout his cross-examination by Axel, George additionally admitted that he was not sure whether or not TORN tokens have been “a completely totally different token than ETH,” saying, “It’s not an element that I’ve to usually navigate in my work.” When requested if he knew what Crypto.com (the change from which the sufferer’s funds originated) was, the knowledgeable replied: “I’ve not seemed into Crypto.com and what it could possibly be.”
Subsequent steps
By their very own witnesses, the protection will try to roll again among the characterizations and allegations made by the prosecution. On Friday, the protection will name an knowledgeable witness in addition to Columbia Enterprise College professor Omid Malekan, who will testify about his use of Twister Money.