Topic: Liberty reserve arrests (Read 6127 times)

It was somewhat useful/ big. I used it to navigate through various payment systems and exchanges. The smaller exchanges like BTC-E would accept Liberty Reserve as a vehicle to deposit USD into an account.

No - you only need to be big enough. Then they dare not fight you. Picture the school yard, LR is a small boy, HSBC and Wachovia are 330 pound tatooed steroid gang bangers out of control. The janitor will haul the small LR boy in front of the head master to have him punished, while he dare not take on the big boys much, he fear them.

And also too many politicians are probably paid under the table some way or another, and they're afraid the big banks are too big to fail, but the reality is that by doing what they do, they lose the faith and the trust of the public, as the public sees that the big criminals have a free card to commit crimes, thus the trust in the traditional banking system erodes, and we get distributed peer to peer cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

How long till drug kartels or other criminal organizations start piggybacking on cryptocurrencies ? They might even start their own exchanges..

Was Liberty Reserve a big player in BitCoin?? 

Interesting stats on Russian TV today:

HSBC money laundering case: $680 billion
Wachovia money laundering case: also several hundred billion $
Liberty Reserve money laundering case: $6 billion

HSBC paid a fine of less than $10 billion. No arrests or jail time.
Wachovia case got so heavily buried/entwined in the 2008 crash, I doubt any proper justice was meted out to the perpetrators there (I'd never heard of this case before today)
Liberty Reserve.... well, we all know what the details are (multiple individuals all face jail time, company entirely dissolved, all assets seized)


So.......

The crime is identical in all 3 cases

The magnitude of the crime is many times more for both HSBC and Wachovia....

And yet no HSBC or Wachovia employees faced any responsibility for it.




Have crime and punishment suddenly developed an inversely proportional relationship? If you commit a criminal act, don't worry about the consequences, just do more of the same, and you'll get treated more leniently?

Lots of 'nice badges' on this page now:

http://libertyreserve.com/index.html

I wonder how many honest people just got robbed of their savings and funds.

Here we have Department of Justice, Global Illicit Financial Team, Criminal Investigation Department of the Treasury US Special Agent, United States Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent, was it not enough to just write: "We seized the money, regards US Govt".

So, in the alleged fight for justice, they just shut down the business of a company without sending them to trial first, and in the process they seize the accounts for all account holders. Well, if you used LR, you've got to be a criminal anyway - too bad for you - is probably in their line of thinking.

There's a lot of honest folks having their money seized now. I believe the crooks here are the US Govt, at least you don't prevent crimes by making other crimes (ie. stealing people's money). This is what they are doing.

If they want to shut down entities that deal in illicit transactions, the first thing they would need to do would be to shut down the entire US banking system on US soil. Is there at all any bank that has not aided in illicit transactions and been given a fine for the last 20 years ? Did we see any of these banks have their website shut down and the bosses arrested? No.

Why?  Because those organizations are powerhouses. They rule the world. They can do whatever the hell they want, and the consequences are a mild slap on the wrist and being told not to be naughty anymore.

The US Govt do not care about catching criminals and protecting the children (just look at drone bombing of innocent children in Afghanistan, it's just collateral damage when trying to kill the evil terrorists, how many are killed by now - are we even after 9/11 yet??), they only care about their own power and might. They want to control the US dollar. They know that controlling the money means having the power.

Everyone that have lost money in the LR debacle, and wants to go public with their names, should write letters to US embassies in their country and let the US know what their opinion is. There's a lot of people here who lost a lot of money, and some people were dependent on the money that they lost.

This is basically scare tactics and who knows who they want to target next. If they decide that too many people use bitcoin for childporn, drugs, terrorist financing and whatever scapegoat they can come up with, people involved with bitcoin will be next. When you're first engulfed in a case, you're into a lot of shit, and it's not fun.

 Even now our capable forces led by Darth Vader are striking back at the Rebel insurgents.

What implications to the BitCoin market ? Is this the beginning of a longterm policy by US authorities ?


From BBC News:

"The takedown of the Liberty Reserve digital cash exchange has caused "pain" to criminals who used the facility, according to a leading security expert.

Brian Krebs said he had seen comments on crime-linked restricted access forums suggesting many had suffered "steep losses".

US prosecutors published an indictment against the site's staff on Tuesday.

It says they deliberately helped users "distribute, store and launder the proceeds of their illegal activity".

Costa Rica-based Liberty Reserve had essentially functioned as a "black market bank" which had "allegedly processed 55 million separate financial transactions, and laundered a staggering $6bn [£4bn] in criminal proceeds", said Preet Bharara, Attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a press conference.

He added that about $25m had been seized following the arrest of Liberty Reserve's founder Arthur Budovsky in Madrid, Spain.

Four others have also been arrested and at least a further two men are being sought. In addition, computer servers used by the firm in Costa Rica and Switzerland are being examined.

According to the indictment, Liberty Reserve was estimated to have had "more than one million users worldwide", a fifth of whom were in the US.
Entrance to property linked to Liberty Reserve Police have raided businesses and homes linked to Liberty Reserve in Costa Rica

However, since the site is accused of failing to verify its members' identities, it is unknown how many accounts were registered to identical individuals.

"Short-term it will cause quite a bit of pain," Mr Krebs told the BBC.

"If you're running a cybercrime operation and you lose half or three-quarters of your capital that can hurt and put a dent in your overall ability to perpetuate your business or whatever you are doing.

"The medium to long-term impact is going to hinge largely on what law enforcement is able to glean from the data it has taken from Liberty Reserve.

"It may lead them to be able to identify people who are ringleaders in cybercriminal activity. That said, it's very likely that information is heavily encrypted, and [based on the experience of other cases] the government is going to need the co-operation of the people they've arrested.