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2020/03/01 - [가상화폐] - 비트코인을 활용한 은밀한 마약거래의 실태
2020/02/12 - [가상화폐/자금세탁방지법] - Liverty Rerserve, 돈세탁 혐의로 미법무부에 기소
LIBERTY RESERVE
In what is to date the largest online money-laundering case in history, in May 2013, the US Department of Justice charged Liberty Reserve, a Costa Rica-based money transmitter, and seven of its principals and employees with operating an unregistered money transmitter business and money laundering for facilitating the movement of more than 6 billion USD in illicit proceeds. In a coordinated action, the Department of the Treasury identified Liberty Reserve as a financial institution of primary money laundering concern under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, effectively cutting it off from the US financial system.
Established in 2006, Liberty Reserve was designed to avoid regulatory and law enforcement scrutiny and help criminals distribute, store, and launder the proceeds of credit card fraud, identity theft, investment fraud, computer hacking, narcotics trafficking, and child pornography by enabling them to conduct anonymous and untraceable financial transactions.
Operating on an enormous scale, it had more than a million users worldwide, including more than 200 000 in the United States, and handled approximately 55 million transactions, almost all of which were illegal. It had its own virtual currency, Liberty Dollars (LR), but at each end, transfers were denominated and stored in fiat currency (US dollars).
How to transfer money by using LR
To use LR currency, a user opened an account through the Liberty Reserve website. While Liberty Reserve ostensibly required basic identifying information, it did not validate identities. Users routinely established accounts under false names, including blatantly criminal names (“Russia Hackers,” “Hacker Account,” “Joe Bogus”) and blatantly false addresses (“123 Fake Main Street, Completely Made Up City, New York”).
To add a further layer of anonymity, Liberty Reserve required users to make deposits and withdrawals through recommended third-party exchangers— generally, unlicensed money transmitting businesses operating in Russia, and in several countries without significant governmental money laundering oversight or regulation at that time, such as Malaysia, Nigeria, and Vietnam.
By avoiding direct deposits and withdrawals from users, Liberty Reserve evaded collecting information about them through banking transactions or other activity that would create a central paper trail.
Once an account was established, a user could conduct transactions with other Liberty Reserve users by transferring LR from his or her account to other users, including front company “merchants” that accepted LR as payment. For an extra “privacy fee” (75 US cents per transaction), users could hide their Liberty Reserve account numbers when transferring funds, making the transfers completely untraceable.
After learning it was being investigated by US law enforcement, Liberty Reserve pretended to shut down in Costa Rica but continued to operate through a set of shell companies, moving millions through their accounts in Australia, Cyprus, China, Hong Kong, Morocco, Russia, Spain and elsewhere.