Perhaps readers are familiar with the Sherlock Homes story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, more particularly the famous plot device of the dog that didn’t bark. What our sleuthing hero was able to deduce from the muted mutt was that the supposed guard dog didn’t alert anyone to wrongdoing because he knew who the wrongdoer was.
After delving in to the most curious case of The United States of America vs. Liberty Reserve, while no match for Sherlock Homes, I was in a similar quandary.
But let’s back up a little. It is possible many readers are, at best, only vaguely familiar with Liberty Reserve and at worse completely unaware of what it was and what it did. Liberty Reserve was, put simply, a huge financial fraud, money launderer, sanctions evader and enabler of pretty much any kind of loathsome criminal activity you can mention. From the indictment:
… the scope of [Liberty Reserve’s] unlawful conduct is staggering. Estimated to have had more than one million users worldwide, with more than 200,000 users in the United States, Liberty Reserve processed more than 12 million financial transactions annually, with a combined value of more than $1.4bn. Overall, from 2006 to May 2013, Liberty Reserve processed an estimated 55 million separate financial transactions and it believed to have laundered more than $6bn in criminal proceeds.
Way back in 2013, when Liberty Reserve was shut down and the owners arrested, it did briefly make the mainstream media. This was after the U.S. Department of the Treasury discovered (I’m tempted to prefix this with the word “finally”, but I’ll resist the temptation) all the shady dealings going on at Liberty Reserve and promptly (well, not that promptly, it did take 7 years or more) threw the Patriot Act at it.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/liberty-reserve-bitcoin-and-the-us-bank-regulatory-dog-that-didnt-bark.html
After delving in to the most curious case of The United States of America vs. Liberty Reserve, while no match for Sherlock Homes, I was in a similar quandary.
But let’s back up a little. It is possible many readers are, at best, only vaguely familiar with Liberty Reserve and at worse completely unaware of what it was and what it did. Liberty Reserve was, put simply, a huge financial fraud, money launderer, sanctions evader and enabler of pretty much any kind of loathsome criminal activity you can mention. From the indictment:
… the scope of [Liberty Reserve’s] unlawful conduct is staggering. Estimated to have had more than one million users worldwide, with more than 200,000 users in the United States, Liberty Reserve processed more than 12 million financial transactions annually, with a combined value of more than $1.4bn. Overall, from 2006 to May 2013, Liberty Reserve processed an estimated 55 million separate financial transactions and it believed to have laundered more than $6bn in criminal proceeds.
Way back in 2013, when Liberty Reserve was shut down and the owners arrested, it did briefly make the mainstream media. This was after the U.S. Department of the Treasury discovered (I’m tempted to prefix this with the word “finally”, but I’ll resist the temptation) all the shady dealings going on at Liberty Reserve and promptly (well, not that promptly, it did take 7 years or more) threw the Patriot Act at it.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/liberty-reserve-bitcoin-and-the-us-bank-regulatory-dog-that-didnt-bark.html
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