The K-Land media are abuzz with the shutdown of money transfer operation 'Liberty Reserve', hailing a huge blow against money laundering.
Tabloid Bild Zeitung calls it "Gangster Bank", a moniker used by many in the past five, six years for the likes of HSBC, Goldman, and very other Swiss bank.
Apparently, moving money through Liberty Reserve was pretty easy, so they would have had this coming.
The total allegedly transferred over six years or so is stated as 6 billion dollars, which at 55 million transactions by one million users ends up at some 6000 per user. Compared to the sums moved by HSBC and other banks, we are talking peanuts. Compared to official estimates of laundered and otherwise illegal money out there, the Reserve handled not even a drop in the bucket.
Given that Liberty Reserve was also used for legitimate transfer in countries where services like PayPal do not operate, the grand total is even lower.
But that's not the point.
The point is that there were illegal transactions and that the operations was sufficiently low hanging to prosecute and make into a pretty PR piece, maps and all.
Once again, the reader comments to the articles were more enlightening than the pretty world map shown by proud prosecutors.
The bad red states on the take-down map showed the usual suspects, Germany was not marked red, just like Mongolia.
In the reader comments, two distinct camps of "freedom advocates" and "crime fighters" exist, illustrating where the fault lines are.
A hilarious crime fighter accuses the "online generation" of being naive, a freedom advocate accuses the powers that be of wanting control just for the sake of control.
That just about sums it all up.
Nothing to see here folks, move on, move on, please!
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