Liberty Reserve exchange shuts down, founder arrested
Liberty Reserve, a Costa Rica-based private currency exchange with its own digital currency, has shut down around the same time its founder has been arrested in connection with a money laundering investigation. Arthur Budovsky, the exchange's founder, was arrested Friday in Spain, according to the Costa Rican newspaper The Tico Times. The paper reported that the money laundering investigation was a joint operation between authorities in the US and Costa Rica. (This YouTube video, posted Saturday, features a Costa Rican prosecutor discussing the investigation.) It added that US authorities....
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Liberty Reserve, one of the more popular alternative payment processors for the USD and Euro, has been shut down and its owner, Arthur Budovsky, arrested in Spain as part of a joint money laundering investigation by police in the United States and Costa Rica. Budovsky had been arrested before in 2006, when he and Vladimir Kats were arrested for operating Gold Age, a digital currency exchanger which the US federal government deemed to be a money transmitting business, without a license. However, they received probation, and Budovsky continued to operate Liberty Reserve. This time, the....
The founder of Liberty Reserve, a private digital currency system shuttered by the US government for its alleged use by organized crime, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. Arthur Budovsky was arrested in the spring of 2013 and later extradited to the US for trial. He was ultimately charged with the operation an unlicensed money transmission business as well as conspiracy to both operate an unlicensed money services business and commit money laundering. Budovsky pled guilty to the money laundering conspiracy charge in January after spending years trying to fight the US government’s....
The concept of digital currency was well-known way before Bitcoin and consorts staked their claim. One of the most notorious digital currencies in history is Liberty Reserve, which ultimately failed because it was still centralized. Furthermore, the founder of Liberty Reserve pleaded guilty to money laundering recently, a concept that is not possible with Bitcoin by any means. One of the main reasons why Liberty Reserve became so popular and well-known throughout the years is because this digital currency was used for criminal activities all over the world. Laundering money online was....
A US district judge has denied a motion by the one of the founders of early digital currency firm Liberty Reserve to dismiss a federal indictment filed two years ago. According to court documents, Arthur Budovsky asked the judge to waive the indictment on multiple grounds in June, raising questions about whether the firm, based in Costa Rica, was required to register as a money services businesses and whether bitcoin qualifies as "funds". US District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York rejected Budovsky's motion, which will set the stage for Budovsky to head to trial.....
Vladimir Kats is well known as one of the co-founders of digital currency service Liberty Reserve. He was arrested for a number of charges including money laundering, marriage fraud and receiving child pornography. Some of the charges related to his role in running Liberty Reserve and its money laundering – at least $6 billion. The company Liberty Reserve had began its work on 2006 in Costa Rica. The company touted itself as being the Internet’s largest payment processor and offered its services to people across the globe including those in the US. Since then, it operated one of the....