Roman Storm Trial Heats Up: IRS Agent Claims He Controlled Tornado Funds

At the center of the case is whether Storm could have taken steps to prevent illegal use of Tornado Cash. Prosecutors argued that he could block or discourage bad actors from moving money through the platform.

On July 23, they brought in IRS Special Agent Stephan George, who stated that he reviewed transaction data tied to Crypto.com $1.23B and Binance $6.56B .

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Based on those records and conversations between the Tornado Cash co-founders, Storm, Alexey Pertsey, and Roman Semenov, George told the court that Storm appeared to have "control" over certain funds after crypto from a Binance-linked wallet was sent to Tornado Cash.

This testimony came after Storm’s lawyers pushed back. In a July 21 trial, a witness named Hanfeng Lin testified that crypto she lost in a romance scam ended up going through Tornado Cash. However, the defense argued that later research showed those funds did not touch the service.

They questioned whether George was qualified to speak about how crypto funds were traced and said they might even ask for a mistrial.

In a court filing on July 22, Storm’s legal team stated, "While his accounting background might have provided him the expertise to conduct the analysis he was retained to do, it does not qualify him to testify regarding the tracing of cryptocurrency criminal proceeds which the government is now proposing".

Meanwhile, US authorities have officially closed their investigation into Jesse Powell, the co-founder of Kraken $193.45M . What did Powell say? Read the full story.