Tag Archives: Money laundering

Jimmy Mengel ~ How NOT to Launder a Billion Dollars

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Outsider Club May 31 2013

In this country, there are two ways to operate a criminal enterprise: totally underground or hiding in plain sight.

Liberty Reserve has learned the hard way that if you want to launder billions of dollars for criminals, you had better choose the latter.

The currency company just got nailed for washing $6 billion worth of criminal funds through their secretive online currency.

In case you’re wondering, theirs was a relatively simple scheme…

Here’s how it worked: You opened an account with Liberty Reserve using a fake name and email address. You sent your U.S. dollars to an unregulated currency exchange in Russia, Nigeria, or Vietnam, where the unscrupulous currency exchanger coverts your dollars to LRs,Liberty Reserve’s online currency.

Those LRs were then transferred to another Liberty Reserve member in return for drugs, stolen credit card numbers, or any other type of illegal item or service. The recipient was then sending their ill-gotten gains to the unregulated currency exchange, who converted the LRsback into dollars.

Liberty Reserve made its money by charging users 1% transaction fees and $0.75 “privacy fees” to facilitate the exchanges. This scheme allowed “the bank of choice for the underworld” to conduct 55 million transactions for its one million users before getting busted.

This is one of the biggest money-laundering schemes ever hatched — and the founders of Liberty Reserve, Arthur Budovsky and Vladimir Kats, now find themselves facing what could be decades in prison.

Some of the their more clownish clients actually opened up accounts with names like “Russian Hackers” and “Hacker Account.” Cute.

Here’s the type of criminals that were using Liberty Reserve:

  • Traffickers of stolen credit card data and personal identity information
  • Peddlers of various types of online Ponzi schemes
  • Computer hackers for hire
  • Unregulated gambling enterprises
  • Underground drug-dealing websites
  • Child pornographers

Not necessarily the most endearing of folks, to be sure…

However, these thugs don’t look so bad when compared to the actions of “legitimate” superbanks like HSBC.

Too Big to Jail

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Mike Adams ~ Feds Raid Liberty Reserve And Indict Founders On Money Laundering Charges… Is Bitcoin Next?

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NaturalNews May 29 2013

Isn’t life interesting living under the rule of a criminal cabal? The U.S. gov’t shuts down Liberty Reserve for “laundering” $6 billion but they can only give chump-change fines to HSBC, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank, for laundering thousands of billions in drug money and God only knows what else. Talk about a double standard. ~G

If there’s one thing monopolists hate, it’s competition. That’s probably why the U.S. government shut down Liberty Reserve yesterday, charging seven men with laundering $6 billion for over one million clients. Calling Liberty Reserve a “bank of choice for criminals,” the feds won’t be satisfied until they destroy every currency that competes with the U.S. dollar.

That’s because the Federal Reserve is actually the largest money laundering operation of all. It routinely creates trillions of dollars in counterfeit currency for it’s favorite mob banksters like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Disguised with labels like “banker bailouts” or “economic stimulus programs,” these handouts of fiat currency debase all the other dollars held by everyone else. It’s the greatest financial swindle in history, making Bernie Madoff look like an amateur.

OMG, the currency was used by criminals? Say it isn’t so!

Maintaining monopoly control over the money supply, however, means destroying the competition. Liberty Reserve was starting to look like competition, so it had to be taken out. The investigation involved 17 countries, and the P.R. propaganda campaign has the entire mainstream media characterizing Liberty Reserve as some sort of money laundering scheme when, in reality, it was just a private electronic currency.

For example, the Washington Post said that Liberty Reserve catered to “…drug traffickers, child pornographers and others in the criminal underworld…”

Um, you mean similar to the way CASH is used by drug traffickers, child pornographers and the criminal underworld? If a currency is to be blamed for all its uses by criminal elements, then no currency is more covered in blood, cocaine, sex slavery and evil deeds than the U.S. dollar — simply because it’s the most-used currency on the planet. Is the Washington Post surprised that criminals use currencies or something?

Blaming Liberty Reserve for the actions of criminals is sort of like blaming the manufacturers of duct tape for all the kidnappings that take place around the world. Gee, duct tape is used by evil people to bind the hands of kidnapping victims? Raid the company! Shut down the duct tape! Duct tape is bad!

What’s clear from this shutting down of Liberty Reserve, by the way, is that the world’s financial monopolists aren’t going to tolerate competition. Their goal is to shut down all competing currencies, and the next target on their list may be bitcoin.

The problem with bringing down bitcoin is figuring out whose doors to kick in

There’s just one problem with that whole plan: Whose doors do you kick in? Bitcoin isn’t run by one company. It’s a decentralized currency, and there’s no one company that handles the transactions.

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Paul Rosenberg ~ Bitcoin: The Tyranny Test

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FreemansPerspective.com May 20 2013

An increasing number of people have complained about governments and central banks in recent years, even using the word “tyranny” to describe them. They are, of course, called names in the establishment press: conspiracy theorists, mainly.

Calling someone a name, however, does not erase their argument (at least not among rational people) and both the governments and the big banks stand accused.

Up till now, however, these accusations were never accepted by the general public. The average guy really didn’t want to hear about the evils of government money. After all, that was the only thing he had ever used to buy food, clothes, gasoline, cars, and so on. He didn’t want to acknowledge the accusations because he feared what might happen to him without his usual money.

Now, however, we have a brand new currency (called Bitcoin) available to us: something radically different. This gives us a new way to directly address the subject of monetary tyranny, providing a clear test for the governments and money masters of the world:

If they are truly NOT tyrannical, they will leave this new currency alone.

If they ARE tyrannical, they will attack the new currency because it eats into their scam.

In other words, Bitcoin is a test for “the powers that be.” The way they deal with this new method of exchange will reveal their true nature.

If they ignore Bitcoin, they refute the charges of tyranny. If they attack it, they verify those charges.

After all, what honest reason could there be to attack an inherently peaceful tool for transferring value?

Prospective Reasons

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Simon Black ~ This Is Why You Don’t Want To Move Gold Yourself…

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SovereignMan April 10 2013

A few days ago, Italian authorities stopped a man who was making his way across the border into Switzerland with his wife and three children.

They searched his car and found, literally, a ton of gold bars hidden in a floorboard storage compartment.

Needless to say, the gold was confiscated, the car was impounded, and the man was arrested, despite the fact that it’s perfectly legal to own and transport gold.

Now, the European Union does require that ‘cash’ in excess of 10,000 euros be declared when crossing borders.

Yet article II of EC regulation 1889/2005 states that “cash” for the purposes of declaration includes legal tender currency plus monetary instruments in bearer form– travelers cheques, promissory notes, bearer bonds, and stock certificates. Not gold. And certainly not gold bars.

So the man was actually well within his legal rights. But it didn’t matter. They nabbed him on ‘suspicion of money laundering.’

As one of the most bankrupt European Union member states, Italy is going down a very dangerous road indeed. They’ve already imposed bank withdrawal restrictions, raised taxes, and openly flirted with bank nationalization.

No doubt, after watching what happened in Cyprus, Italians are scared. And they’re not the only ones.

Candidly, everyone living under a bankrupt, insolvent government should consider the very strong possibility that their savings will be plundered, their retirement accounts seized, and capital controls imposed.

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George Washington ~ Jaw-Dropping Crimes Of The Big Banks

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ZeroHedge March 15 2013

Preface: Not all banks are criminal enterprises. The wrongdoing of a particular bank cannot be attributed to other banks without proof. But – as documented below – many of the biggest banks have engaged in unimaginably bad behavior.

You Won’t Believe What They’ve Done …

Here are just some of the improprieties by big banks:

  • Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this
  • Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
  • Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this andthis. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car
  • Committing massive fraud in an $800 trillion dollar market which effects everything from mortgages, student loans, small business loans and city financing
  • Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this
  • Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this
  • Participating in various Ponzi schemes. See this, this and this
  • Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

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Elizabeth Warren ~ Banks Get Wrist Slaps While Drug Dealers Get Jail [Video]

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Les Grossman March 7 2013 (Thanks, Minty)

Warren (D-Mass.) grilled officials from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency about why HSBC, which recently paid $1.9 billion to settle money laundering charges, wasn’t criminally prosecuted and shut down in the U.S. Nor were any individuals from HSBC charged with any crimes, despite the bank confessing to laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and rogue regimes like Iran and Libya over several years.

Defenders of the Justice Department say that a criminal conviction could have been a death penalty for the bank, causing widespread damage to the economy. Warren wanted to know why the death penalty wasn’t warranted in this case.

“They did it over and over and over again across a period of years. And they were caught doing it, warned not to do it and kept right on doing it, and evidently making profits doing it,” Warren said of HSBC. “How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?”

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James Hall ~ Long History Of HSBC Money Laundering

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BATR | December 19 2012

If there was any lingering doubt about the supremacy of the internationalist banker over the canons of law, the latest HSBC exemption from criminal charges proves that the real masters of the planet are the criminal banksters. If this settlement was an abnormality and not the rule, one might argue the expediency for pragmatism, while deployable, is necessary. Unfortunately, for the financial elites, the facts tell a very different story.

The Associated Press reports in Government outlines HSBC ties to drug money laundering.

“In court papers filed in federal court in Brooklyn, the federal government said the case against HSBC is related to the laundering of proceeds from narcotics trafficking via the Black Market Peso Exchange, a method by which money launderers convert cash narcotics dollars into Colombian pesos by buying and re-selling wholesale consumer goods.

“The lack of an effective anti-money laundering program at HSBC Mexico and HSBC Bank USA, N.A. contributed to the conduct charged” in the money-laundering case against narcotics traffickers, Justice Department prosecutors said in court papers.”

Published in the Globe and Mail account, HSBC failed to control drug-money laundering, Senate finds, indicates the political nature of this investigation.

“A year-long investigation by a Senate committee uncovered that HSBC acted as a conduit for drug money, disguised the sources of funds to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran, and included among its clients businesses with alleged ties to terrorism. HSBC’s internal culture has been “pervasively polluted for a long time,” said Carl Levin, a senator from Michigan, who helped lead the investigation.”

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Matt Taibbi ~ HSBC Settlement Proves The Drug War Is A Joke

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Reader Supported News | December 15 2012

matt_taibbi3If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

The banks’ laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC’s Mexican branches and “deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows.”

This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the “legitimate” banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank’s teller windows. Tony Montana’s henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional “American City Bank” in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain’s most storied financial institutions.

See Scarface Push it to the limit Scene [~3 minutes]

Though this was not stated explicitly, the government’s rationale in not pursuing criminal prosecutions against the bank was apparently rooted in concerns that putting executives from a “systemically important institution” in jail for drug laundering would threaten the stability of the financial system. The New York Times put it this way:

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Mark H. Gaffney ~ Black 9/11: Money, Motive and Technology [Audio]

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 | October 7 2012

Mark H. Gaffney is an environmentalist, peace activist, and researcher-writer. Over the years, Mark’s articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, newspapers, and widely on the Internet. He is the author of five books. He joins us to talk about his book Black 9/11: Money, Motive and Technology.

In the first hour, Mark presents evidence for insider trading in the days before 9/11, and other crimes of the US financial elite. He also suggests that secret cutting-edge technologies may have been covertly used on September 11, 2001, such as technology to remotely access/control commercial jetliners. We’ll discuss other interesting details and witness reports related to 9/11. In the second segment, we’ll discuss the destruction of evidence and the demolition of building 7. We’ll talk more about insider trading, money laundering, slush funds and amazing coincidences all connected to 9/11. Later, Mark talks about the future of the US economy, including more laws and regulations.

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Prof. James Petras ~ The Ascendancy Of A Criminal Financial Elite

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Global Research | August 5 2012

The Two Faces of a Police State: Sheltering Tax Evaders, Financial Swindlers and Money Launderers while Policing the Citizens

“The rotten heart of finance” The Economist

“There is a degree of cynicism and greed which is really quite shocking” Lord Turner Bank of England , Financial Service Authority

Introduction

Never in the history of the United States have we witnessed crimes committed on the scale and scope of the present day by both private and state elites.

An economist of impeccable credentials, James Henry, former chief economist at the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Company, has researched and documented tax evasion. He found that the super-wealthy and their families have as much as $32 trillion (USD) of hidden assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenue! This study excluded such non-financial assets as real estate, precious metals, jewels, yachts, race horses, luxury vehicles and so on. Of the $32 trillion in hidden assets, $23 trillion is held by the super-rich of North America and Europe .

A recent report by a United Nations Special Committee on Money Laundering found that US and European banks laundered over $300 billion a year, including $30 billion just from the Mexican drug cartels.

New reports on the multi-billion dollar financial swindles involving the major banks in the US and Europe are published each week. England ’s leading banks, including Barclay’s and a host of others, have been identified as having rigged the LIBOR, or inter-bank lending rate, for years in order to maximize profits. The Bank of New York, JP Morgan, HSBC, Wachovia and Citibank are among scores of banks, which have been charged with laundering drug money and other illicit funds according to investigations from the US Senate Banking Committees. Multi-national corporations receive federal bailout funds and tax exemptions and then, in violation of publicized agreements with the government, relocate plants and jobs in Asia and Mexico .

Major investment houses, like Goldman Sachs, have conned investors for years to invest in ‘garbage’ equities while the brokers pumped and dumped the worthless stocks. Jon Corzine, CEO of MF Global (as well as a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, former US Senator and Governor of New Jersey) claimed that he “cannot account” for $1.6 billion in lost client investors funds from the collapse of MF Global in 2011.

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Max Keiser ~ A Concise List Of Recent Bank Fraud

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Govt Slaves | July 18 2012

Max Keiser  ~ Here are some recent improprieties by the big banks:
  • Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this
  • Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Detailshere, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
  • Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers.  See this, this, this,this and this.  This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car
  • Committing massive fraud in an $800 trillion dollar market which effects everything from mortgages, student loans, small business loans and city financing
  • Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this
  • Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this
  • Participating in various Ponzi schemes. See this, this and this
  • Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

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