DOJ Fumbles Key Telegram Evidence in Tornado Cash Case—Dev Storm Calls Out Blunder

Privacy protocol drama turns procedural as Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev (aka 'Storm') slams DOJ's mishandling of Telegram evidence. The feds' crypto-crime case might be leaking like a defective smart contract.

Encryption ≠ Evidence Destruction

Pertsev's legal team claims prosecutors butchered critical Telegram communications—the digital equivalent of losing the murder weapon. Without chain-of-custody integrity, the case resembles a rug pull waiting to happen.

Regulators vs. Code Warriors

This latest blunder fuels the crypto community's favorite narrative: bureaucrats can't tell a hash from a hashtag. Meanwhile, Wall Street still thinks Tornado Cash is a new ETF.

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.

DOJ pursues federal charges against Roman Storm, cofounder of Tornado Cash, after dropping unlicensed money transmission charge.#TornadoCash #RomanStorm https://t.co/ZGXe7IGREZ

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.

A Russian crypto firm CEO used his crypto company, Evita, to funnel $530 million of overseas payments via US banks and crypto platforms.#Evita #CryptoFraud #IuriiGugninhttps://t.co/hk5kgucF95

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.