After that, on August 10, the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) detained Alexey Perstev, 29, who was thought to be the creator of the Tornado currency.
On August 24, a Dutch judge dismissed Perstev’s request for bail and ordered him to serve a 90-day sentence behind bars.
On August 12, when Perstev was initially taken before the bench, the examining judge consented to hold him in detention for two weeks.
Later on August 24, Pertsev’s attorneys submitted a bail application, which was denied. The court also established a 90-day window for the first public hearing.
His detention was suspected of “involvement in concealing unlawful financial flows and enabling money laundering,” according to the Dutch financial crime regulator FIOD, through the decentralized Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash.
When Did It All Began?
In June, the Financial Advanced Cyber Team of the FIOD began looking into Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash “has been utilized to mask large-scale illegal money flows, notably from (online) thefts of cryptocurrencies,” the researchers claimed. The specific legislation Pertsev is accused of breaking is unknown to the Dutch government, which has sparked worldwide calls for his release.
Crypto enthusiasts have been outraged by Perstev’s detention in jail despite not officially being charged with a crime.
The cryptocurrency community came together to support Alexey Pertsev, collecting over 2,000 signatures on a petition to increase awareness of his situation and perhaps secure his release.
The accusations against Perstev, according to the Change.org petition started by product manager Daria Mironova of Helsinki, “threaten to eliminate the whole open-source software segment.”
The accusations against Alex, according to many crypto enthusiasts, pose a threat to the future of open-source software as a whole. The detention of Pertsev also raises concerns about how closely a person must be involved in a protocol before they may be held accountable for its abuse.
