Twister Money Developer Storm Claims DOJ Bungled Important 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 courtroom 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 truly 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 fees 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 Beneath 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 by means of Twister Money.

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

The protection contends that prosecutors can not authenticate the extraction’s completeness as a result of they have been restricted in what information they may get hold of from Dutch regulation enforcement.

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

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

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

In response to the listening to transcript, Arad informed the courtroom: “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 value of stolen crypto.”

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

Protection attorneys wrote of their submitting: “Provided 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 subject 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, significantly when worldwide proof gathering intersects with complicated digital communications.

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

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

Storm’s protection has persistently argued that the case threatens to criminalize open-source software program improvement, 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 not too long ago seized $225 million in USDT was linked to a world “pig butchering” rip-off that defrauded over 400 victims by means of a community of worldwide exchanges and wallets.

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