If you follow online security news, you've heard of e-gold.com. The digital currency service purportedly allows users to transfer money without any real ID verification, which seems to make it popular with online crooks and fraudsters, like those behind last year's Cryzip extortion malware.
To recap, Cryzip ordered its victims to deposit a ransom into an e-gold account if they wanted the password to unlock their zipped-up files. It appeared to be a very clumsy extortion attempt, and I hope that few people fell prey.
The Department of Justice says it has more examples of use of e-gold accounts for nefarious purposes. According to our friends at IDG News Service, a grand jury in D.C. indited e-gold and others on Friday on charges of money laundering.
The IDG story also says the DOJ has seizure warrants for more than 55 accounts the department says are involved in money laundering.
I haven't seen hard evidence myself. But I do hear over and over how hard it is to successfully prosecute any of the bad actors in the thriving online fraud business. So if e-gold is found guilty, it could be a relatively rare win for the good guys.
I would like to encourage your readers to review the hyperlinks in our original Press Release on the e-gold.com News page. I am particularly interested in independent asessment of the transcript from the emergency hearing before Magistrate Judge Facciola of 12/29/05 and the emails between myself and the USSS circa 11/04 - 1/05. The cryzip thing by the way... our investigators busted it before there was a single victim or payment.
E-gold isn't guilty of money laundering because it doesn't deal in "money" (i.e., any national currency), but with buying and selling actual gold. It is therefore outside of any laws governing money laundering. The USSS has passed up opportunity after opportunity to go after real bad actors (child porn and wire fraud) because it meant cooperating with e-gold and making use of its vast database of transactions and IPs. This is nothing more than an attempt by the DOJ and USSS to circumvent due process and run e-gold out of business, when the company has cooperated with EVERY request to assist government investigators for over a decade, without court orders. Certain bureaucrats in the DOJ and Treasury just don't like an unregulated company using the trading of a precious metal in a fashion that "smells" like currency, because it edges in on their exclusive "turf" (money). All this talk of facilitating criminals is so much smoke screen designed to obscure the real money trail.