US federal prosecutors and the co-founders of the crypto mixer Samourai Wallet have asked a court for more time to consider potentially dismissing the case after the Justice Department rolled back its crypto enforcement.

Lawyers for Samourai Wallet CEO Keonne Rodriguez and chief technology officer William Hill said in an April 28 letter to Manhattan federal judge Richard Berman that they jointly requested with the government “for a continuance of the pretrial motions schedule by 16 days.”

The Samourai executives’ lawyers said on April 10 that they wrote to Acting Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton to request the dismissal of the case after an April 7 memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche shuttered the Justice Department’s crypto team.

“On April 24, 2025, defense counsel met with the prosecutors and their supervisors in person at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to discuss this request,” the lawyers said.

“The Defendants believe that a continuance of the pretrial motions schedule is warranted to permit Defendants to avoid the significant expense of preparing their motions while the Government determines its position,” the letter stated.

It added that prosecutors agreed to adjourn “without expressing any views on the merits.”

Samourai Wallet’s Rodriguez and Hill were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in April 2024, to which they both pleaded not guilty.

Blanche’s memo said, “The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” and it would abandon enforcement and investigations besides those which “focus on prosecuting individuals who victimize digital asset investors, or those who use digital assets in furtherance of criminal offenses.”

An excerpt of the letter to Judge Berman. Source: PACER

Currently, motions in the Samourai executives’ case are due May 13, responses are due on June 10, and replies on June 24. The letter proposes to put this back to May 29 for motions, June 26 for responses, and July 10 for replies.

The continuance would not affect the trial date, which is slated for early November. 

Quashing crypto litigation list lengthens 

The move is the latest in a long list of court actions to have prosecutors’ crypto cases quashed under the Trump administration’s favorable stance toward the industry. 

Related: SEC says it won’t re-file fraud case against Hex’s Richard Heart 

On April 9, SafeMoon CEO Braden John Karony, who is charged with wire fraud and money laundering, cited Blanche’s directive in a bid to get his case dismissed. 

Meanwhile, on April 28, the DeFi Education Fund petitioned the White House to drop charges against Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm and requested immediate action to “discontinue the Biden-era Department of Justice’s lawless campaign to criminalize open-source software development.” 

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Researchers at the University of Zurich have been accused of undertaking an unauthorized four-month-long experiment on a Reddit board using artificial intelligence-generated comments to test whether AI could alter people’s opinions. 

As part of the experiment, AI-powered accounts faked a variety of personas, including a rape victim, a person opposed to specific social movements and a trauma counselor specializing in abuse, moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit said in an April 26 post.

“Our sub is a decidedly human space that rejects undisclosed AI as a core value,” the moderators said. “People do not come here to discuss their views with AI or to be experimented upon.” 

The researchers used AI to generate responses but attempted to personalize the replies based on information from the original posters’ prior Reddit history, such as political orientation, gender, age, and ethnicity, according to a draft of the paper.

Moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit say researchers at the University of Zurich conducted an unauthorized experiment within their community. Source: Reddit

Over the four-month experiment, Zurich University’s fake AI accounts posted 1,783 comments and received 137 deltas — a mark showing when another Reddit user acknowledged the account had persuaded them to change their opinion on an issue. 

The researchers said in a post to the subreddit that all comments were manually reviewed before posting to ensure they met the community guidelines and to “minimize potential harm.”

The university team argued that the potential benefits of this research substantially outweigh its risks. Source: Reddit

The university team argued that the “potential benefits of this research substantially outweigh its risks” because they have found that the large language models used in the experiment can be highly persuasive, surpassing all “previously known benchmarks of human persuasiveness.”

“Our controlled, low-risk study provided valuable insight into the real-world persuasive capabilities of LLMs — capabilities that are already easily accessible to anyone and that malicious actors could already exploit at scale for far more dangerous reasons,” the researchers said. 

At the same time, the researchers said the experiment shows that distinguishing humans from AI still faces significant challenges because nobody in the subreddit discovered the AI bots during the entire experiment. 

The r/changemyview board has 3.8 million members and ranks among the top 1% of subreddits by size.

Reddit considers legal options 

The Reddit board’s moderators said they were unaware of the experiment and have asked the university for an apology and to block the publication of the research. 

Reddit might also be considering legal action, as the platform’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, said in a follow-up April 28 post that the experiment broke the site’s user agreement and rules, and all known accounts associated with the University of Zurich research effort were now banned. 

“We are in the process of reaching out to the University of Zurich and this particular research team with formal legal demands,” Lee said. 

“We want to do everything we can to support the community and ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds here,” he added. 

Related: White House receives over 10,000 comments on AI development plan

In its response to the subreddit, the University of Zurich’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Ethics Commission said it had investigated the incident and promised to coordinate better with test subjects in the future. The lead investigator for the project was also issued a formal warning.

“This project yields important insights, and the risks are minimal. This means that suppressing publication is not proportionate to the importance of the insights the study yields,” the ethics commission said. 

The University of Zurich did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Cointelegraph did not immediately receive a response to questions sent to an email address associated with the experiment.

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The founders of the crypto fintech firm Bankera used funds from the project’s 2018 initial coin offering to purchase luxury properties worldwide, according to a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

The OCCRP reported on April 28, citing leaked company records and bank statements, that nearly half of the funds from Bankera’s 100 million euro ($114 million) ICO were transferred to a bank in the Pacific Island country of Vanuatu that was purchased by the project’s founders, Vytautas Karalevičius, Justas Dobiliauskas and Mantas Mockevičius.

Soon after, the Vanuatu bank reportedly began issuing millions of euros in loans to companies owned by the trio to build a luxury real estate portfolio — including a villa in the French Riviera and high-end property in Lithuania, where the project was founded.

Bankera’s three founders. Source: Bankera

The leaked records and statements reportedly show that the funds were used to underwrite loans to other companies, which were then used to purchase high-end real estate. 

The Vanuatu bank also loaned millions more directly to the three founders for “personal use,” according to the OCCRP report.

Lawyers representing the founders reportedly denied that the ICO was fraudulent but declined to comment on specific transactions. 

Cointelegraph contacted Bankera for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

Bankera over-promised, under-delivered

Bankera pledged to become the “bank for the blockchain era,” offering a suite of retail and institutional investment services while holding and exchanging most of the largest cryptocurrencies.

Many investors were attracted to the Bankera (BNK) token ICO by the promise of discounted rates on Bankera’s services and products, along with the opportunity to earn weekly BNK payouts.

However, an investor in Bankera’s ICO told the OCCRP that those weekly payouts began to “drop significantly below the promised amount.”

The revenue-sharing scheme was reportedly halted in 2022.

Related: Tether scales crypto payments in Eastern Europe with new investment

Bankera also reportedly promised to obtain a European Union banking license, which is yet to materialize.

Despite the 100 million euro ICO raise, the fully diluted value of the BNK token is currently at $975,710, CoinGecko data shows.

Bankera continues to provide crypto-related banking services and maintains an active social media presence on LinkedIn and, to a lesser extent, X.

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