Roman Sterlingov
Federal — District of Columbia
Roman Sterlingov
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SENTENCE
12 years, 6 months (150 months) federal prison, forfeiture money judgment of $395,563,025.39, forfeiture of 1,345 Bitcoin (valued at approximately $103 million), forfeiture of $1.76 million in seized cryptocurrency and monetary assets
CHARGES
Money laundering conspiracy Money laundering Operating an unlicensed money transmitting business Money transmission without a license (D.C. Money Transmitters Act)

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THEIR STORY

Roman Sterlingov was born around 1989 and holds dual Swedish and Russian citizenship. He was an early Bitcoin adopter and investor. Before his arrest, he had never been to the United States.

Bitcoin Fog was a cryptocurrency mixing service that operated on the darknet from October 2011 to April 2021. The service processed over 1.2 million Bitcoin transactions totaling approximately $400 million at the time. Prosecutors alleged the majority came from darknet marketplaces linked to drug trafficking, identity theft, and other criminal activity.

Roman was arrested April 27, 2021, at LAX. He was charged with money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, and money transmission without a license. He was held in federal custody and denied access to seized funds for legal defense despite the court acknowledging his need.

Roman’s defense, led by Tor Ekeland, maintained throughout that Roman was a user of Bitcoin Fog, not its operator. The prosecution relied almost entirely on Chainalysis’s proprietary Reactor software. The defense challenged this methodology: it had never been peer-reviewed, the specific IP analysis was invented for this case, and CipherTrace’s independent analysis found no evidence linking Roman to Bitcoin Fog.

After a month-long trial in March 2024, the jury convicted on all four counts. On November 8, 2024, Judge Randolph Moss sentenced Roman to 150 months and ordered forfeiture of over $395 million.

In September 2025, ChainArgos filed an amicus brief demonstrating that Chainalysis’s trial evidence involved addresses outside its own Bitcoin Fog clusters — the prosecution’s tracing evidence contradicted its own analysis. Chainalysis filed its own amicus in support of the government in February 2026.

Roman’s case is the first criminal prosecution in the U.S. to go to jury trial based primarily on blockchain tracing evidence. If his conviction stands, it establishes a precedent that anyone can be convicted based on unverified proprietary software. If overturned, it will be the most important ruling on blockchain forensics reliability in the history of cryptocurrency law. His appeal hearing is May 12, 2026.

WHY THEY DESERVE A PARDON

Roman Sterlingov is a 36-year-old dual Swedish-Russian citizen serving 12.5 years in federal prison for allegedly operating Bitcoin Fog, a cryptocurrency mixing service. Roman has maintained from the day of his arrest that he did not create or operate Bitcoin Fog. He says he was a user — not the operator. The government never found Bitcoin Fog’s servers. They never found server logs. They never found a single communication between Roman and anyone operating Bitcoin Fog. They never found private keys in his possession. No victims testified at trial. No victims were identified at sentencing. No eyewitnesses to his alleged operation of Bitcoin Fog testified because none exist. The entire case was built on blockchain tracing software produced by Chainalysis, a private company whose tools have never been independently peer-reviewed. A competing firm, CipherTrace, ran the same data and found no evidence linking Roman to Bitcoin Fog. CipherTrace’s expert was prepared to testify — until Mastercard, which had acquired CipherTrace, pulled the report. The defense lost its tracing expert right before trial. A government expert testified that Chainalysis’s methods produced “no false positives” — a zero percent error rate. Anyone with scientific training recognizes that a 0% error rate in real-world analytical software is not a sign of reliability. It is a sign the tool has not been properly tested. Roman was arrested at LAX in April 2021. He had never set foot in the United States before his arrest. The government established jurisdiction by having an IRS agent send a single email to Bitcoin Fog’s customer service from within D.C. His defense has asked the DOJ to drop charges under the Blanche memo directing the department to end “regulation by prosecution” in digital assets. The DOJ has not dropped the charges. Roman’s appeal hearing is scheduled for May 12, 2026. From Fort Dix, Roman has written about prison conditions — strip searches, lockdowns without showers, guards howling over loudspeakers at 3 AM. He writes with clarity and composure. He is a man who insists he did not do what the government says he did, convicted on evidence produced by unverified proprietary software, serving over a decade in federal prison.