Tornado Cash Developer Storm Claims DOJ Bungled Critical Telegram Evidence

Roman Storm, co-founder of the sanctioned Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, has accused federal prosecutors of fundamentally mishandling key evidence ahead of his July 14 criminal trial in Manhattan.

The dispute centers on a Telegram message reading “Heya, anyone around to chat about axie? Would like to ask a few general questions about how one goes about cashing out 600 mil,” which referenced the $600 million Axie Infinity exploit.

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

Defense attorneys revealed the message was actually written by Andrew Thurman, a former CoinDesk senior tech reporter, then forwarded to a Tornado Cash chat by Pertsev.

The revelation emerged just days before Storm’s trial on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and sanctions violations related to Tornado Cash, which allegedly facilitated over $1 billion in illicit transactions.

Government’s Evidence Chain Under Tight Scrutiny

The controversy stems from Dutch authorities’ extraction of what prosecutors claim is Pertsev’s phone following his arrest in the Netherlands, where he was sentenced to 64 months in prison for money laundering through Tornado Cash.

Storm’s defense argues that the government’s extraction contains multiple fatal flaws, including missing author information for forwarded Telegram messages and incomplete file retrieval by FBI Agent Dickerman from Dutch authorities.

The defense contends that prosecutors cannot authenticate the extraction’s completeness because they were limited in what files they could obtain from Dutch law enforcement.

This authentication challenge becomes more significant given that the government admitted in court filings that its original September 2023 production of extracted text messages to the defense did not include “forwarded” tags on forwarded messages.

Prosecutors provided a corrected version in December 2024, which they plan to use at trial, but defense attorneys argue this timeline raises serious questions about the government’s handling of evidence.

The misattribution carried real consequences in court proceedings when Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Arad referenced the message during a July 8 pretrial hearing, telling the judge it demonstrated the co-founders’ awareness of wrongdoing.

According to the hearing transcript, Arad told the court: “For example, when the Ronin hack happened, one of the co-conspirators asked, sum and substance, I’d like to ask you some questions about how you go about laundering $600 million worth of stolen crypto.”

The defense characterized this as providing “false information” to both the court and potentially the grand jury that issued the indictment.

Defense attorneys wrote in their filing: “Given that the government mistakenly attributed the reporter’s Telegram message to Pertsev at the Pretrial Conference, it appears that the government itself was unaware of this issue until the defense raised it.”

Enforcement Challenges Echo Across Crypto Cases

The evidence dispute highlights a pattern of prosecutorial challenges emerging across high-profile cryptocurrency cases, particularly when international evidence gathering intersects with complex digital communications.

Just last month, the DOJ faced similar authentication issues in the case of Russian crypto CEO Iurii Gugnin, who was charged with orchestrating a $530 million fraud scheme through his Miami-based platform Evita.

That case also involved cross-border evidence collection and questions about the authenticity of digital communications used to establish criminal intent.

Storm’s defense has consistently argued that the case threatens to criminalize open-source software development, with the Ethereum Foundation pledging $500,000 toward his legal defense and matching up to $750,000 in community contributions.

As part of the DOJ’s crypto fraud crackdown, the recently seized $225 million in USDT was linked to a global “pig butchering” scam that defrauded over 400 victims through a network of international exchanges and wallets.

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