DOJ Says Liberty Reserve Money Launder Of Choice For Underworld--Site Shut Down And Founder Charged With Child Trafficking And Money Laundering

Digital currency business Liberty Reserve has been shut down, the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed today in an indictment that charges the site’s operators with various criminal activities.

This past weekend, we covered the first reports that Liberty Reserve founder Arthur Budovsky was arrested and that Liberty Reserve had been shut down. The site stopped operating on Thursday. As of today, Liberty Reserve’s website now directs to a static image saying it has been seized by “the United States Global Illicit Financial Team in accordance with a seizure warrant obtained by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.”

The Department of Justice asserts that Liberty Reserve’s operations were highly criminal in nature and facilitated money laundering. While the DoJ makes the case that many Liberty Reserve users were using it for criminal activity, anyone on the Internet could have easily signed up to use the service to transmit money to family and friends or to trade currencies online.

Many regular users that didn’t use the service for criminal means claim to have lost thousands of dollars due to the shutdown. (We sympathize with any non-criminal users that have lost access to their money on Liberty Reserve and arecontinuing to look for details about how the shutdown has affected their lives and businesses.)

The Department of Justice estimates that Liberty Reserve had more than one million users worldwide, with more than 200,000 users in the United States. It says that Liberty Reserve processes more than 12 million financial transactions annually, with a combined value of more than $1.4 billion. MOREHERE