Twister Money Developer Storm Claims DOJ Bungled Essential Telegram Proof

Roman Storm, co-founder of the sanctioned Twister Money cryptocurrency mixer, has accused federal prosecutors of essentially mishandling key proof forward of his July 14 felony trial in Manhattan.

The dispute facilities on a Telegram message studying “Heya, anybody round to speak about axie? Wish to ask a couple of normal questions on how one goes about cashing out 600 mil,” which referenced the $600 million Axie Infinity exploit.

In response to court docket filings dated July 12, 2025, prosecutors initially claimed the message was authored by Storm’s co-developer Alexey Pertsev.

Protection attorneys revealed the message was really written by Andrew Thurman, a former CoinDesk senior tech reporter, then forwarded to a Twister Money chat by Pertsev.

The revelation emerged simply days earlier than Storm’s trial on expenses of conspiracy to commit cash laundering and sanctions violations associated to Twister Money, which allegedly facilitated over $1 billion in illicit transactions.

Authorities’s Proof Chain Below Tight Scrutiny

The controversy stems from Dutch authorities’ extraction of what prosecutors declare is Pertsev’s telephone following his arrest within the Netherlands, the place he was sentenced to 64 months in jail for cash laundering via Twister Money.

Storm’s protection argues that the federal government’s extraction accommodates a number of deadly flaws, together with lacking writer info for forwarded Telegram messages and incomplete file retrieval by FBI Agent Dickerman from Dutch authorities.

The protection contends that prosecutors can’t authenticate the extraction’s completeness as a result of they had been restricted in what information they might get hold of from Dutch legislation enforcement.

This authentication problem turns into extra vital on condition that the federal government admitted in court docket filings that its unique September 2023 manufacturing of extracted textual content messages to the protection didn’t embrace “forwarded” tags on forwarded messages.

Prosecutors supplied a corrected model in December 2024, which they plan to make use of at trial, however protection attorneys argue this timeline raises critical questions concerning the authorities’s dealing with of proof.

The misattribution carried actual penalties in court docket proceedings when Assistant U.S. Legal professional Ben Arad referenced the message throughout a July 8 pretrial listening to, telling the choose it demonstrated the co-founders’ consciousness of wrongdoing.

In response to the listening to transcript, Arad instructed the court docket: “For instance, when the Ronin hack occurred, one of many co-conspirators requested, sum and substance, I’d prefer to ask you some questions on the way you go about laundering $600 million price of stolen crypto.”

The protection characterised this as offering “false info” to each the court docket and probably the grand jury that issued the indictment.

Protection attorneys wrote of their submitting: “On condition that the federal government mistakenly attributed the reporter’s Telegram message to Pertsev on the Pretrial Convention, it seems that the federal government itself was unaware of this difficulty till the protection raised it.”

Enforcement Challenges Echo Throughout Crypto Circumstances

The proof dispute highlights a sample of prosecutorial challenges rising throughout high-profile cryptocurrency circumstances, notably when worldwide proof gathering intersects with complicated digital communications.

Simply final month, the DOJ confronted related authentication points within the case of Russian crypto CEO Iurii Gugnin, who was charged with orchestrating a $530 million fraud scheme via his Miami-based platform Evita.

That case additionally concerned cross-border proof assortment and questions concerning the authenticity of digital communications used to ascertain felony intent.

Storm’s protection has persistently argued that the case threatens to criminalize open-source software program growth, with the Ethereum Basis pledging $500,000 towards his authorized protection and matching as much as $750,000 in group contributions.

As a part of the DOJ’s crypto fraud crackdown, the just lately seized $225 million in USDT was linked to a world “pig butchering” rip-off that defrauded over 400 victims via a community of worldwide exchanges and wallets.

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