The U.S. Secret Service have arrested five individuals and seized multiple bank accounts related to a $6 billion money laundering scheme being described by authorities as “staggering” and the largest ever case of international money-laundering.
In a statement, Secret Service officials said authorities in Spain, Costa Rica and New York arrested five people on Friday and seized bank accounts and Internet domains associated with the company Liberty Reserve – a Costa Rica-based website that deals in digital currency and allows transnational online payments and money transfers.
Digital currency is a form of online currency made up of transferable units that can be exchanged with cash, and has exploded in popularity in the last decade with the increasing use of Bitcoin, the most widely used form of digital currency. Liberty Reserve’s currency was not connected with Bitcoin.
Charging a low one percent fee on transactions, Liberty Reserve allowed users to open accounts using fictitious names, including “Russian Hacker” and “Hacker Account,” and to redeem the currency for cash in any part of the world using the third-party exchange companies.
Aditya Sood, a computer science doctoral candidate at Michigan State University who has studied the underground economy, described Liberty Reserve as a no-questions-asked alternative to the global banking system, with little more than a valid email needed to open an account and start moving money across borders.
“You don’t need to provide your full details, or personal information, or things like that,” Sood said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press. “There’s no way to trace an account. That’s the beauty of the system.”
Arthur Budovsky, the founder of Liberty Reserve, was one of the individuals arrested, while a defendant identified as Budovsky’s partner, Vladimir Kats, was in custody in New York.
According to the statement from the Secret Service, Liberty Reserve had approximately one million users worldwide with more than 200,000 users in the United States. Overall, the company processed an estimated 55 million separate financial transactions and is believed to have laundered more than $6 billion in criminal proceeds.
“The scope of the defendants’ unlawful conduct is staggering,” said an indictment unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.
The indictment described the network as “one of the principal means by which cyber criminals around the world distribute, store and launder proceeds of their illegal activity … including credit card fraud, identity theft, investment fraud, computer hacking…and narcotics trafficking.”
Read more: FOX NEWS
{Matzav.com Newscenter}
Money laundering is when people transfer their own private property without notifying the Big Brother. Yes, hackers and drug dealers using those online services is scary, but the all-powerful government that can cease property and web domains without a trial is even more scary. By the way, how come our government does not flex its web-domain-shot-down muscle when it comes to the Islamic terrorist websites? Who threatens us more – digital money people or the terrorists? The truth is, digital-currencies, with all their imperfections, give people a tool in exchanging goods and services in competition to the government printed paper money monopoly. If nobody wants their freshly-printed paper dollars, the government will go poor – hence the anything-goes mafia-style tactics when it comes to what threatens the core of their power.
#1
Clearly, you have no idea of what money laundering is. Try looking it up on Google, Bing or some such. The rest of your post make no sense in the world of reality. Do you know many people who refuse to accept “government printed paper money”?