Federal prosecutors shut down Liberty Reserve, the alternative-payment network under the Patriot Act low. The patriot act low was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001 as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th. The act expanded the Secretary of the Treasurys authority to regulate financial transactions, particularly those involving foreign individuals and entities. Liberty Reserve was one of world’s largest web based payment processing and money transfer system. The American Justice Department says that since the founding of Liberty Reserve, in 2006, it has handled more than fifty-five million transactions totaling more than six billion dollars, and as of last year it had more than a million users. Liberty Reserve operated like a bank. The deposits from customers could only be performed in its own propriety currency. Customers could open an account with Liberty Reserve, providing the bank with a name, which could be fake, and an e-mail address. The key to the scheme was that you couldnt then deposit money directly into the account. Instead, the customer had to work through middlemen, who were called “exchangers.” These were typically unlicensed person in countries like Malaysia, Nigeria, and Vietnam, who bought Liberty Reserves currency in bulk from Liberty Reserve. The customer paid the “exchangers” in dollars (or other currency) for a certain sum of Liberty Reserves currency. The currency deposited into the customer account. When the customer wanted to withdraw funds, the process worked in reverse, perhaps with an exchanger in a different country. (Liberty Reserve itself took a one-per-cent exchange fee on transactions, while the exchangers typically charged five per cent or more per transaction.) The point of doing it this way was that the Liberty Reserve bank would have no identifying data for the customer (no record of how or from where the customer sent the money), since the deposits and withdrawals were all done through the exchangers, In addition, they allowed customers to do international payments from one account to another via the internet with almost no questions asked. Therefore Liberty Reserve was, by all accounts the most popular form of payment, in the cybercrime underground. These news sharpen the need for reliable and Sobering companies in the international payments field, this field has been a tremendous development at the recent decades. In the past, before the era of the Internet and fast communication, when the banks and authorities had absolute control over banking services, it was impossible to manage without the banks. Subsequently a cartel of banks was formed, manifested by very high commissions for all various services they provided -continuing today despite the increasing competition in some services that previously were dominated exclusively by banks – , starting from any ordinary transaction any person performs in the account up to international payments that one wishes to make between accounts worldwide.
