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'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

bloomberg.com

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Re: 'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

#41

Post by mysterypie »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

This is probably a much better source: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-plead... Thought Bloomberg is well known to quickly publish 2 sentence articles to get an entry in google for breaking news and then back fill the story as it gets more details. If you haven't heard of the bank in question, Liberty Reserve was bank that was heavily used to launder black market money. You could open an accoun…

> You could open an account with an email address, and no other documentation, deposit bitcoins, and then pull out your holdings in the form of cash or gold.

That alone is not a bad thing. Why shouldn't you have freedom and privacy with your money?

I know very well that draconian banking control is how some crimes are solved or some crimes avoided. That's how it works currently, but it doesn't have to be that way. Was the world really awash in crime before Know Your Customer, Currency Transaction Reporting, and all the other controls came into existence in the last 30 years?

Re: 'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

#42

Post by pakled_engineer »

celticninja wrote: post #12
chollida1 wrote: post #2

This is probably a much better source: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-plead... Thought Bloomberg is well known to quickly publish 2 sentence articles to get an entry in google for breaking news and then back fill the story as it gets more details. If you haven't heard of the bank in question, Liberty Reserve was bank that was heavily used to launder black market money. You could open an accoun…

It was active way before bitcoin existed and their primary currency was Liberty Reserve Dollars. You could deposit via western union or other cash deposit methods and transfer funds internationally with no questions. Bitcoin was added as another method fairly late on.

LR just provided the ledger, you bought in and cashed out through 3rd party exchangers who were supposed to do all the KYC checking. LR also would freeze any account that moved more than some arbitrary amount that I can't remember but you could open pretty much unlimited accounts with slightly different info to keep under the limits. They weren't as bad as the DoJ claims unless there was private side dealing they discovered.

When the exchangers started allowing Visa/MC ATM card loads is when all the org crime flocked to LR to cash out their stolen db sales and attention from DoJ started.

Re: 'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

#43

Post by dmix »

mysterypie wrote: post #41
chollida1 wrote: post #2

This is probably a much better source: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-plead... Thought Bloomberg is well known to quickly publish 2 sentence articles to get an entry in google for breaking news and then back fill the story as it gets more details. If you haven't heard of the bank in question, Liberty Reserve was bank that was heavily used to launder black market money. You could open an accoun…

> You could open an account with an email address, and no other documentation, deposit bitcoins, and then pull out your holdings in the form of cash or gold. That alone is not a bad thing. Why shouldn't you have freedom and privacy with your money? I know very well that draconian banking control is how some crimes are solved or some crimes avoided. That's how it works currently, but it doesn't have to be that way. Wa…

Bureaucratic control grows exponentially.

I don't believe it has to be tied to specific trends in crime. Only a few random but well covered stories of crime is enough to persuade the public into handing over more power and calling for new stronger laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

Re: 'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

#44

Post by EdHominem »

rtpg wrote: post #17
alva wrote: post #5

>Prosecutors in New York said the company operated as “the financial hub for cyber criminals around the world.” Well fortunately for the cyber criminals, I have some great suggestions for alternative banking solutions. Plus! Your co-conspirators will almost definitely never face a day in jail. Think you will have to pay for expensive flights to Switzerland to open your account? Save some of that hard earned cash and…

There's this trope about us choosing to not throw people in jail but its just a consequence of needing real evidence against a person. Holder made some ckmment to the line of " if we had the evidence , people at the DOJ would be rushing to charge. Throwing a Wall St exec in jail is a career-making case" (edit: actual quote https://mobile.twitter.com/lauraolin/status/7279880874149847... ) The interests are totally ali…

No, if this was an accident then many people were criminally negligent.

Start prosecuting them for failing to ask the right questions and see if they start implicating others to save themselves. (ie, normal prosecutorial procedure.)

Re: 'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

#46

Post by EdHominem »

rayiner wrote: post #11
alva wrote: post #5

>Prosecutors in New York said the company operated as “the financial hub for cyber criminals around the world.” Well fortunately for the cyber criminals, I have some great suggestions for alternative banking solutions. Plus! Your co-conspirators will almost definitely never face a day in jail. Think you will have to pay for expensive flights to Switzerland to open your account? Save some of that hard earned cash and…

To pick one example, what did JPM do that involved "outright criminal fraud?" Give specific examples that a jury would convict for, keeping in mind that knowledge and intent must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. If I had to guess, what made this case easy was the fact that the guy left the country under circumstances where it could be inferred he know he was facilitating illegal transactions. That was the key ele…

Very few of the mortgages were for financially supportable situations (ie well outside normal rent/buy price ratio) and many were on variable rate loans. It was fairly obvious to savvy real-estate investors let along trained mortgage lenders what would happen.

I saw headlines pre 2007 discussing this. We have whistleblowers testifying that they were actively warning people.

Offer immunity to the first few in trade for testimony..

Re: 'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

#47

Post by [deleted] »

rtpg wrote: post #17
alva wrote: post #5

>Prosecutors in New York said the company operated as “the financial hub for cyber criminals around the world.” Well fortunately for the cyber criminals, I have some great suggestions for alternative banking solutions. Plus! Your co-conspirators will almost definitely never face a day in jail. Think you will have to pay for expensive flights to Switzerland to open your account? Save some of that hard earned cash and…

There's this trope about us choosing to not throw people in jail but its just a consequence of needing real evidence against a person. Holder made some ckmment to the line of " if we had the evidence , people at the DOJ would be rushing to charge. Throwing a Wall St exec in jail is a career-making case" (edit: actual quote https://mobile.twitter.com/lauraolin/status/7279880874149847... ) The interests are totally ali…

[deleted]

Re: 'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years

#49

Post by rayiner »

revelation wrote: post #36
rayiner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't bring a case if you don't think you can get a jury conviction. It's unethical. Prosecutors brought two Bear Stearns executives to trial near the beginning of the financial crisis and they were acquitted.

Of course it is unethical, as is piling on 20+ separate charges for a single act and then doing a plea deal for one. That's the point: if you are being unethical already, does it hurt you to occasionally steamroll someone higher up the food chain in the same manner? That's just keeping the peace. But to ignore vast abuses on the one side, and then list everything out of the UN charter when it comes to why you can't p…

I agree piling on charges just in hopes of extracting a plea deal is unethical.[1]

However you're talking about a totally different sort of unethical prosecution. When the government steamrolls a drug dealer, they have a ton of physical evidence of an illegal act. You can debate whether those acts should be illegal, or the justice of the sentences, but a jury would definitely convict on the basis of the evidence.

What you're talking about is charging people for crimes when you can't even articulate what specific acts they did were illegal or present concrete evidence of illegal acts a jury could convict on.

[1] A lot of that practice was the result of DOJ policies that required prosecutors to bring charges to maximize the sentence. Obama recently eliminated that policy allowing prosecutors to use their discretion.

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