Published via Inbox: 2013-05-29 16:14:51
"(Liberty Reserve is) a criminal business venture...designed to help criminals conduct illegal transactions and launder the proceeds," the unusually colorful indictment says. "(It was) a financial hub of the cyber-crime world."
One of the world’s most widely used digital currencies, Liberty Reserve was used as a secret money system for credit card thieves, identity thieves, Ponzi scheme peddlers, hackers for hire, child pornographers, even drug dealer websites, federal officials claim in an indictment unsealed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court. The virtual money system allowed perhaps a million criminals to anonymously move money around the world.
My Two Cents
How will the Liberty Reserve shut down impact BitCoin? Can anybody tell me how BitCoin doesn't become just like Liberty Reserve over time? From what I can tell, BitCoin is decentralized and P2P; while Liberty Reserve was "more" centralized (using "Exchangers" to avoid any direct relationship). However, it was centralized enough that Liberty Reserve was able to be shut down via DNS (and have their domain taken over by the US Dept of Treasury, Secret Service and DHS).
According to krebsonsecurity.com and the Internet Systems Consortium, at least 5 others virtual currency sites were also taken down: –milenia-finance.com, asianagold.com, exchangezone.com, moneycentralmarket.com and swiftexchanger.com.
