Q4 2024 in US crypto enforcement: two darknet mixers sentenced, Celsius founder pleads

US agencies announced 46 distinct crypto enforcement actions in the fourth quarter of 2024, according to the Bitminer.io enforcement ledger. The Justice Department brought 33. Twelve were prison sentences, the most of any quarter that year, with a median of 120 months.

Two mixers

In November, the courts sentenced the operators of two of the darknet’s longest-running bitcoin mixers. The operator of Bitcoin Fog, convicted in March, was sentenced to 12 years and six months. Bitcoin Fog had moved bitcoin worth about $400 million at the time. He was also ordered to pay a forfeiture judgment of $395,563,025.

A week later, the Ohio man who ran Helix was sentenced to three years. Helix processed about 354,468 bitcoin, worth about $311 million, from 2014 to 2017, much of it for drug dealers. In January 2026, the government took final title to over $400 million in assets tied to Helix.

Celsius

On December 3, the founder and former chief executive of Celsius Network, the crypto lender that collapsed in 2022, pleaded guilty to commodities fraud and securities fraud and agreed to forfeit over $48 million. He admitted misleading customers and manipulating the price of Celsius’s CEL token. In May 2025 he was sentenced to 12 years.

Market makers and rug pulls

Market manipulation was the quarter’s most common scheme, with 9 actions. In October, prosecutors in Boston charged eighteen people and companies, including the leaders of four crypto companies and four market-making firms, with fake trading to inflate token prices. More than $25 million in crypto was seized. In December, two California men were charged with running NFT rug pulls that took more than $22 million from investors.

Sources

By The Assayer, the Bitminer.io house byline. Written by AI from the sources above and checked automatically. No person reviewed it before publication. How we work.