E-gold Owners Plead Guilty To Money Laundering

Ian Lamont writes "The three owners of Internet currency service e-gold have pled guilty to money laundering in the U.S. District Court for D.C.. The service is based in the West Indies, but the directors apparently live in Florida. They haven't been sentenced yet, but potentially face decades in prison and millions in fines. In addition, the principal director posted a blog entry yesterday saying that 'criminal activity will not be tolerated,' and pledging to eliminate the loopholes that allowed money laundering to thrive on the service. He also claims that e-gold has more transaction volume in a single quarter than all of the first-generation Web currency services like Cybercash, Beenz, and Flooz completed over their lifetimes. Ironically, one of the reasons that contributed to Flooz's demise in 2001 was rampant money laundering."

Comments

E-Gold... Why didn't I think of that?

[RandoX]

Here I am, looking up "Money Laundering" in the dictionary trying to figure it out.

Damn, was an easy way to buy gold...

[Anonymous Coward]

This royally sucks because e-gold was actually a very simple and easy way to purchase gold with very few and simple fees, and none of the tax burden.

Re:Damn, was an easy way to buy gold...

[ScrewMaster]

This royally sucks because e-gold was actually a very simple and easy way to purchase gold with very few and simple fees, and none of the tax burden.

Maybe that's another reason the Feds are going after them.

Re:Damn, was an easy way to buy gold...

[jcr]

At least it isn't as bad as it was during the Depression. They made owning gold ILLEGAL back then. What a crock.

That ban was unconstitutional, of course. Not that that's stopped the federal government from doing whatever the hell they wanted since the Lincoln administration.

-jcr

Re:Damn, was an easy way to buy gold...

[istartedi]

You don't pay a tax for switching to gold. You only pay a tax on the CAPITAL GAIN you make if you sell at a profit. Your trading commissions and losses are actually DEDUCTIBLE.

Also, gold is no more fiat than anything else. Only 20% of it is put to industrial use. The rest is traded because people like it. If people stop liking it, down it goes. Think that can't happen? Think again. When the Conquistadors came to the West, Natives filled their coffers with gold on request. This was, only in part because they wanted to appease the Spaniards. Gold while attractive to them, was not monetary like it was in Spain. They valued jade (another scarce commodity) in that fashion. Had the Spaniards requested a room full of jade, it might have been another story.

Warren Buffet hit the nail on the head when he said: "It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."

My own quote on the matter: "Under the current system money is managed by the Fed, which reports to Congress. Under a gold standard money is managed by international mining cartels and speculators. This is better, how?".

Then of course, there's the tendancy of gold standard advocates to ignore the history of business cycles under the gold standard (Hint, it wasn't a recession-free paradise). Why, praytell, have so many otherwise intelligent people been lured onto the gold bandwagon lately?

Re:Damn, was an easy way to buy gold...

[alexgieg]

I think you're seeing history inverted. I look at the 20th century, and I see cycles an interminable sequence of booms and busts mixed with inflationary and hyperinflationary phases. I look at the 19th century, and I see customer and other prices with almost perfect stability, so much that anyone could save money for bad times by simply storing it in their houses, rather than at some bank, as is required now.

You also talk about liquidity, but it was precisely the artificial liquidity created during Woodrow Wilson's government, by way of cheap loans at below market rates, that created the boom of bad investments that imploded in 1929. And then it was the New Deal that, by providing even more cheap loans and thus creating more (useless) liquidity, that extended what would have been self-correcting recession, into a full blown, decade-long depression.

I suggest you search for "1929" and "gold standard" at classic liberal sites such as the Mises Institute one. People usually accuse them of not using measurements as any good scientific method requires, but whenever I read them what I find the most are historical analyzes. These two search terms alone provide plenty of evidence, and good data.

Re:Damn, was an easy way to buy gold...

[TheLink]

I'm not a US citizen, or an economist, or some financial genius, so feel free to ignore the following:

Summary:
Right now the USA is like a casino where the rest of the world uses its casino chips to buy and sell food, oil, services. Can you not see the advantage for the USA? Why should they want to switch to the gold standard, or any other standard? That would be stupid for them.

Details:
The US Dollar as a global trading currency, that's _controlled_ by the USA is a good thing for the USA.

Because what that means is all the countries around the have to keep reserves of US dollars to buy and sell stuff - like _petroleum_ for instance.

So you have trillions of US dollars, outside the USA, in _foreign_ hands.

Whenever the US Gov decides to print more US Dollars, it in effect taxes ALL the other countries in the world holding billions of US dollars, and countries lending the US Gov money in _USD_. Because their USD becomes worth less, and therefore they become _poorer_.

It takes time for the countries to change their prices in USD e.g. random Chinese stuff will still cost USD19.95 for a few months or more, so in that time the USA can still buy the same amount.

It is thus easier for the US to retain its position in the rich-poor country hierachy.

In contrast if my country's gov decided to print more of its own currency - its citizens would become poorer, the rest of the world would just laugh and very quickly adjust the exchange rates, then any loans in foreign currencies will become more expensive to pay back, foreign stuff will be more expensive to import nearly overnight.

Thus as long as the USD is the defacto trading currency and the US Gov gets to control it, the USA gets a free ride and can print USD with relative freedom.

There are other ways the US prints money - The USA buys goods from Japan, China, Mexico etc, and pays them in USD. If it does not have enough USD, it issues IOUs and sells them to Japan, China et all, who buy it with USD they just got from the USA (Japan etc use the rest of the dollars to buy wheat, oil, other commodities).

It may appear a strange system, but it has worked reasonably well for quite a while.

IMO, trouble is the USA has spent a fair amount of the printed dollars in recent wars, so there is a massive "leakage" out of that system, making other countries more likely to notice the USD isn't quite worth so much, and thus forced to change their prices.

A possibly unrelated note ;). Consider that Iraq started selling oil in euros, the US took it over and Iraq is back to selling oil in USD. Now Iran is selling oil in euros... Saudi Arabia the top friend of the USA has stuck to selling oil in USD.

Hit the limit

[Jadware]

The police found out when their gold maxed to 2147483647. Everyone knows glitchers get caught.

eGold now, Paypal next?

[whoever57]

From TFA:

In harmony with this transformation, we acknowledge that e-gold is indeed a Financial Institution or Agency as defined in US law and should be regulated as a Financial Institution. E-gold Ltd.

Nw if the federal authorities could get the same concession from PayPal......

Re:eGold now, Paypal next?

[stry_cat]

Don't worry they will. e-gold was just smaller and didn't have good enough lawyers. Now that they've got a precedent set, the government will turn its attention towards paypal. The government can't stand to have any "unregulated" exchange of goods, services, or capital.

Re:eGold now, Paypal next?

[scipiodog]

Don't worry they will. e-gold was just smaller and didn't have good enough lawyers. Now that they've got a precedent set, the government will turn its attention towards paypal. The government can't stand to have any "unregulated" exchange of goods, services, or capital.

While I do agree with you, I think there's more to this than just regulation.

The US government (actually the Federal Reserve but by extension their lackeys in the government) is terrified of "competing currencies."

They come down especially hard on physical currencies, ie. Gold/Silver. Look at the recent attack on the "Liberty Dollar," for an example.

At the risk of provoking the ire of the anti-Ron Paul people, he's been talking about exactly this for some time.

Of course, it's quite possible that there actually was money laundering going on (it sounds like there was.) My point is just that these chaps weren't taken down because a) they were too small and didn't have good lawyers or b) just because they were laundering money. If you believe that, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you...

Re:eGold now, Paypal next?

[Red Flayer]

US dollars are backed by nothing but the whims of the federal reserve, and it's this very fact that has brought about America's current financial predicament.

Citation, please.

Some economists believe that America's current financial predicament was brought about by deregulation of the banking system, allowing banks to create currency by lending far more than they owned. Some economists believe that the current predicament is due to huge federal budget deficits. Some economists believe the current predicament is due to trade imbalance. I'm sure there are other theories out there.

However, a gold standard is not some magical cure to ecnonomic woes, it carries its own host of problems... and the biggest problem is that it removes the ability to correct for currency valuation issues.

E-Gold holds audited stocks of gold to the value of its deposits, which is a far safer store of wealth than the US dollar.

Gold is a commodity, and thus is not a safer store of wealth than currency -- if anything, it is less safe, since there are fewer controls over the world supply of gold then there are over the supply of currency. Apples to oranges -- one cannot compare a commodity to a currency, they are by nature two different things.

If you really want to consider the problems of a gold standard, look to history. There are reasons the gold standard was abandoned, and no protestations by any number of goldbugs will change the fact that a commodity-backed currency leads to frequent boom-and-bust cycles that are devastating to economies.

The current system is not perfect, but a commodity-backed currency is a nightmare we should not revisit.

Re:eGold now, Paypal next?

[Stanislav_J]

The government can't stand to have any "unregulated" exchange of goods, services, or capital.

Like, say, cash. I really feel that the government would eliminate currency in a heartbeat if they could get away with it. Millions of cash transactions take place every day between private citizens, and the government would dearly love to have a piece of the action (as in taxes) as well as the information (who sold what to whom, and when, and why). Not to mention the IRS. (If I pay my neighbor $20 to clean my gutters because I cannot, or he gives me $50 for my old grill when I get a new one, that's income and we're supposed to be honest and report it! Yeah, right...) Cash transactions with businesses are a bugaboo, too, as the government can't easily track your purchases or link you to them. The powers that be are very upset when they can't snoop into your financial affairs.

The trend away from cash is slow, but steady. The marketplace helps: we have things like the Green Dot debit cards pushed on the lower classes, painting cash as "old fashioned," inconvenient and risky to carry around. Many government payments at all levels, like welfare/unemployment/etc. are now being paid to people not in the form of a check, but on reloadable debit cards. And the fearmongers are doing a great job associating large cash transactions with crime and terrorism -- obviously if you use an untraceable form of payment, you must have something to hide. Just try paying for an airline ticket in cash, or any large transaction (car, etc.) and you will set off at the very least raised eyebrows, and in some cases alarm bells. You can't even purchase above a certain amount in money orders at the post office now without them having to get more details from you (what they are for, where they are going, etc.). The government would adore having every single financial transaction done electronically so that every cent you spend and the recipients of your payments are trackable.

I own no plastic, save for an ATM card, and make all my purchases in cash. It's just a matter of time before this brands me as an "enemy of the state..."

Re:uh-oh

[Scutter]

I knew a guy doing a Susan B. Anthony for movie piracy.

What, he was supposed to do 100 years, but only did 25 because the warden didn't look close enough?

Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007

[bill_mcgonigle]

Last year Ron Paul introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007 which would make alternate currencies legal, though not change other aspects of what you can do with currencies (e.g. money laundering would still be illegal).

Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand. This gave the dollar real worth. Since that time, the government has found that it can simply make more money out of thin air and spend it on government programs to generate votes. As with any supply and demand equation, when they start running the printing presses to make more dollars, the dollars you have in you bank account become worth less. You're losing money value and the government is gaining money value, but your 'taxes' are low. One can see this in inflation charts which start to skyrocket in the 1970's, relative to decades previous. Interesting note: if we measured inflation today the way we used to back then, our inflation rate would be 11%.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a graph showing the value of the dollar vs. gold vs. oil. If we look at the start of the decade until now, if we were holding euros instead of dollars, gas would only be about $2.70 at the pump - that extra $1.30 can be viewed as lost power of the dollar. But, the euro is no panacea either - if you compare the price of gas to the price of gold, it's nearly flat. How about $1.20 gas? I actually saw $5 diesel in CT last weekend.

Not surprisingly, the government decided to stop keeping track of 'M3', or the money supply of the dollar recently. Private economists have continued the calculations and it's easy to see why the government doesn't want to talk about it.

So, back to the beginning, the government has taken irresponsible action with the way it manages the value of its currency, and they have laws preventing people from opting out of their mismanagement. Afraid of a little competition, are they? Experience shows that the most likely effect of competing currencies, even ones that mimic the way the government operated in your parents' generation, would be to pressure the government to exercise some restraint. Of course, if this competition is illegal, they'll continue with their outrageous devaluation.

Folks who think a little competition helps to keep markets fair, and monopolies hurt them, would do well to contact their representatives in government about the aforementioned bill.

Re:Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007

[NeutronCowboy]

You do realize that basing a currency on the supply of an arbitrary resource is just as foolish, if not more so?

The reason people abandoned the gold standard was because of two things:
- random hits to the valuation of a currency due to influx of more resources
- static size of economy.

People who pine for the days of the gold standard either never lived through the problems, or have forgotten all about them.

Re:Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007

[areReady]

A gold-backed dollar is every bit as illusory as a non-backed dollar. The only thing that makes ANY currency worth ANYTHING is that people are willing to accept it and be sure they will be able to spend it themselves. Gold is no more immune to this than paper dollars in the United States - unless the fact that gold is shiny and malleable makes it carry more intrinsic value. The only reason gold has any value is that we assign it value, which exactly why money has value.

People who think returning to a gold-backed dollar would be in any way useful lack some extraordinarily basic economic education. If we were sticking to gold-backed dollars right now, gold's value would plummet just as much as the dollar's.

Re:Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007

[dhovis]

Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand. This gave the dollar real worth.

To paraphrase Terry Prachett: "This was true, so long as nobody actually asked for it." The government NEVER had enough gold on hand to back every single dollar in circulation. The last time I had a friend insist that we should be on the gold standard, I did a quick back of the envelope calculation. If you took all the refined gold in the world, all of it, and used it to back the US dollar only, then the price of gold would have to skyrocket to something like $2,000/oz. This assumes that the price would not go up as you try to buy more gold. There simply isn't enough gold, and the rate of gold production was not keeping up with economic growth in the US and around the world.

Further, I don't understand people who think that the rate of inflation should be pegged solely to the rate of gold mining. Gold isn't particularly rare in the earth's crust, but it is costly to extract. If someone were to develop new technology that extracted gold at significantly cheaper prices, your currency would collapse. This isn't unprecedented. Remember that aluminum was once considered a precious metal until Charles Martin Hall developed an inexpensive electrolytic process for extracting it. From what I hear, there is a new technology coming down the pipe to bring the price of extracting titanium down to the level of aluminum. If something similar happened to gold, a gold-backed currency would be destroyed. In an economy with a fiat currency, you'd just start using the new, cheap gold as a good roofing material.

Re:Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007

[barnackle]

I know this is not the main thrust of the comment, but it's not practical for money to be backed by gold, diamonds, beads, or fragments of mirrors. Money is backed by what you can buy with it. Then, you say, "what if the economy collapses and no one trusts the dollar anymore?" Well, I don't know about you, but I can't eat gold. Or any other precious metal for that matter. "But you can use the gold to buy food." Ah, only because people trust gold as having value while paper money doesn't. Stepping back a step further, each seems to me to be about as useful as the other for its intrinsic physical properties.

But I got off track. The main reason precious metals don't make sense as money is the fact that they don't account for the growth of the economy. To simplify things, let's create a little thought experiment and take it to the extreme. What happens when there is no more gold left to pile up in Fort Knox? Does the economy stop growing at that instant? No. People continue to innovate and create value out of nothing using only their minds and bodies. What do we do then? Switch to another precious metal of which we have more? Switch to commodities?

Or we can just trust eachother. You make something cool and sell it to someone. I make something cool and you use the money you got in your last transaction to buy my cool thing off me. We're just bartering in a huge pool with a little bit of paper to smooth the process.

To address the concerns of the last poster, all we can do is try to be as transparent as possible. And even then, the economy knows what's happening. The government increases the money supply and the inflation numbers will show it, whether they tell us or not. Just like with anything else we buy and sell. Increase supply and the money value of each individual unit drops.

Re:Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

Last year Ron Paul introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007 which would make alternate currencies legal, though not change other aspects of what you can do with currencies (e.g. money laundering would still be illegal).

This is the sort of meaningless drivel that marks Ron Paul and his supporters as kooks.

Today, you are most certainly not obliged to use US dollars. You can use any currency you wish, provided the other party in the transaction agrees. You can take payments in beans, Swiss francs, gold or oil. Many US banks are happy to let you have an account in a foreign currency.

The only case where you are required to take US cash is for payment of a USD debt (that's the "legal tender" statement you see on USD bills).

In US states near the Canadian border, you will often see Canadian quarters, nickels & dimes, since they look very similar to US coins and have almost exactly the same value (1 USD is about 1 CAN).

Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand.

So? Why is gold valuable? It does have some intrinsic industrial value, but the majority of the price of gold is because people think it's valuable. Why do they think it's valuable? Because it's pretty and shiny and people think it's valuable. It's self-fulfilling. It's valuable because people think it is. The degree to which people think something is valuable varies from time to time. iphones seem to be the currency of choice these days.

The gold standard does prevent some economic problems from occurring, but causes many others. These are well known and have been studied to death by economists.

Since that time, the government has found that it can simply make more money out of thin air and spend it on government programs to generate votes.

Government mismanagement & incompetence is not something that only occurs with fiat money.

If you didnt RTFA...

[carp3_noct3m]

E-gold is an online currency service that is backed up by gold. You cannot buy directly from them though, you have to buy through a redistributor, some of which are questionable and only takes certain forms of payment. The nature of the having a third party buy from egold and then sell to another person creates a web of denial effect for money launderes. One of the largest schemes e-gold is used for is in the credit card theft hacker rings, where it is easy to get credit card info, it is harder to "cash out". This is where "cashiers" come in, usually charging a 50 point take on cashing out for someone else. Egold, since it was in a different country, denies US Government requests for transaction records for accounts. E-gold may be in trouble, but for every e-gold there is another replacement, e-platinum, webmoney, and large handful of others. Oh yeah, btw, I didnt RTFA either, I just thought Id share what I know about e-gold, and I might be wrong about some of it.

Where's the anon online cash, then?

[BenEnglishAtHome]

For whatever reason, there are times when people pay cash and have no desire to reveal who they are to the folks with whom they are doing business. (I used to relish, back in the day, going to Radio Shack and refusing to give them my zip or other information as long as I was paying cash. They thought I was weird. I thought being forced to identify myself to buy batteries was just too stupid to put up with.)

So is there any way to anonymously pay for things online? I can think of only one: buy a pre-paid credit card for cash and use it online. Non-reloadable gift cards can be purchased for cash and activated for use online under any name you can think up; there's no verification.

However, that method is inconvenient. Do the slashdot hordes know of a better, easier way that remains anonymous?

Re:US doesn't want anyone moving from the dollar

[phantomfive]

Ah, the fresh smell of slashdot paranoia in the morning. Are you suggesting that the only reason the dollar is worth anything is because of oil? Think about this: the WORLD spends 3.7 trillion dollars on oil a year (2008 estimate). The US produces $13 trillion worth of stuff each year. Even if suddenly everyone tried to get rid of their petrodollars at the same instant, it would not destroy the dollar (hurt it, yes, but not destroy it). There is much more to the US economy than the 'power of the dollar.' There is real production going on there.

Consider this: is the Euro safer? No, remember that the European bankers didn't change the interest rates this month because of inflation worries.

Furthermore, you are making a very bold accusation here, that the US will attack for such a small reason. Why not attack Venezuela then, or Columbia, for that matter, when an attack on either place would reward us greatly?

Business cycles are caused by *credit*

[Colin Smith]

That is, the creation and destruction of credit by banks. Banks lent fractionally on top of gold in exactly the way they do now on top of paper. Whether the currency is based on gold or paper is irrelevant with respect to business cycles, it's the debt based nature of credit and in particular fractional lending practices which are the problem there. Gold on the other hand is naturally scarce and so would restrict inflation whereas paper is not, and does not.

HTH