Double Cashing With Mobile Banking

June 17, 2013
55 Comments

The case of a Kentucky man arrested this month for using mobile banking to steal thousands of dollars from a local supermarket chain highlights the security loopholes that thieves can exploit in mobile check deposit schemes being deployed by financial institutions across the country.

Source: Mybanktracker.com

Source: Mybanktracker.com

Louisville, Ky. based news station WDRB Inc. carried a story last week about a local man who was arrested after allegedly using mobile banking to steal more than $12,000 from multiple Kroger stores.

“Police say 34-year-old Boma Robert Spero-Jack went into several different Kroger stores and purchased at least 32 Western Union money orders. Each money order was issued for an amount between $195 and $500, according to an arrest report. Police say he would then leave the store and deposit the money order into his Bank of America checking or savings account, via a mobile deposit. Spero-Jack would then go back into the Kroger and ‘cash’ the same money order, according to the arrest report. Later, police say he would withdraw the amount of the money order from his bank account.”

The technology that Spero-Jack is accused of exploiting — known as mobile remote deposit capture (mRDC) — allows banking customers to deposit a check by taking a picture of it with a cellphone. The risk for financial institutions that allow mRDC is that the customer retains the paper check, and can potentially deposit it again and again at other institutions.

Robert McGarvey, a reporter who wrote about the Kentucky incident for Credit Union Times, said paranoids in the banking business have long fretted about this ever since MRDC started to roll out a few years ago.

“Frankly, there have been few reported cases — there have been more accidental double deposits than criminal,” McGarvey said. “But now I am hearing about small time gangs doing this.”

McGarvey and others say this is an area that is ripe for exploitation by far more organized operations — the kind of criminal gangs recently busted for extracting tens of millions from ATM cashout schemes, or from account takeovers involving fraudulently-obtained prepaid debit cards. Those schemes involved transferring funds from compromised accounts and did not require the attackers to put up 50 percent of the cost of the fraud to start with, as was the case with the Kentucky crimes.

“The key is to open an account with fake ID, then buy a throwaway phone at WalMart,” McGarvey said. “You are then in business and very, very unlikely to get arrested. Most banks set a low limit – maybe $3,000 per day on MRDC – which also tells the crook he can get $2,999 with no sweat.”

Julie Conroy, a research director with the retail banking practice of Aite Group, a Boston-based research and advisory firm, said banks are not seeing a lot of losses due to this type of fraud…yet.

“But I think ‘yet’ is the operative word there,” Conroy said. “The product is still fairly new, with many banks just rolling out their offering in the last year or so.  Most banks are protecting the product through a combination of rules and velocities, and due to this approach, and the fact that the product is relatively new and doesn’t have a ton of volume yet, this has worked fairly well so far.  However, the service is popular with customers, and as this report shows, the bad guys are finding it too.”

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Iranian Elections Bring Lull in Bank Attacks

June 14, 2013
20 Comments

For nearly nine months, hacker groups thought to be based in Iran have been launching large-scale cyberattacks designed to knock U.S. bank Websites offline. But those assaults have subsided over the past few weeks as Iranian hacker groups have begun turning their attention toward domestic targets, launching sophisticated phishing attacks against fellow citizens leading up to today’s presidential election there.

Phishing email targeting Iranians. Source: Google.

Phishing email targeting Iranians. Source: Google.

Since September 2012, nearly 50 U.S. financial institutions have been targeted in over 200 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A Middle Eastern hacking collective known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has claimed credit for the assaults, and U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly blamed the attacks on hacker groups backed by the Iranian government.

But roughly three weeks ago, experts began noticing that the attacks had mysteriously stopped.

“We haven’t seen anything for about three weeks now,” said Bill Nelson, president and CEO of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), an industry coalition that disseminates data about cyber threats to member financial institutions. “It’s not clear why [the attacks stopped], but there are a lot of things going on in Iran right now, particularly the presidential elections.”

Meanwhile, data collected by Google suggests that the attackers are focusing their skills and firepower internally, perhaps to gather intelligence about groups and individuals supporting specific candidates running for Iran’s presidential seat. In a blog post published this week, Google said that it is tracking a “significant jump” in the overall volume of phishing activity in and around Iran.

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MtGox Phishing Campaign Hits Bing, Yahoo!

June 13, 2013
23 Comments

An active phishing campaign targeting account holders at popular Bitcoin exchange MtGox.com has hijacked the top search results at Bing and Yahoo.com, redirecting unwary clickers to mtpox.com, a look-alike domain and Web site that was registered on June 12, 2013, less than 24 hours ago.

Check out the video I recorded of this phish in action (turn down in the sound if you hated the Iron Man soundtrack):

Update, June 17, 3:07 p.m: Google’s Youtube team has inexplicably removed my video, calling it a violation of YouTube’s policy on the depiction of harmful activities. 8:09 p.m.: YouTube has restored the video.

Hover over the search links returned in Yahoo.com after searching for “Mtgox” and you’ll see what appears to be a paid or perhaps sponsored search ad that lists a result for mtgox.com, although hovering over the link displays a long “yahoo.com” URL. The same is true when you currently search for “mtgox” on Bing.com: hovering over the returned link shows a bing.com address.

In the video above, entering any credentials at the fake “mtpox.com” site caused a site error, but when I tried it again a moment later, I was redirected to the real Mtgox.com.

Interestingly, it appears the phisher in this case simply copied and pasted the code from Mtgox.com; as shown in the video, hovering over either the username or password field on mtpox.com produces the same warning present on mtgox.com — a message advising visitors to check for the green “extended validation” or EV browser certificate in the URL address bar.

mtpoxphish

This attack, while not particularly unusual, is a good reminder that relying on trusted bookmarks is among the safest ways to navigate to sites that hold your personal and financial information. Using a search engine to find these sites is better than direct navigation (in which a fat-fingered key can lead to a phishing site), but as this phish illustrates, it’s always a good idea to double check the URL in the address bar.

Hat tip to Twitter follower Ryan Mattinson.

Adobe, Microsoft Patch Flash, Windows

June 11, 2013
56 Comments

Patch Tuesday is again upon us: Adobe today issued updates for Flash Player and AIR, fixing the same critical vulnerability in both products. Microsoft‘s patch bundle of five updates addresses 23 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office, including one bug that is already being actively exploited.

crackedwinA majority of the vulnerabilities fixed in Microsoft’s June patch batch — 19 of them — are addressed in a cumulative update for Internet Explorer (MS13-047). The other fix that Microsoft called specific attention to is MS13-051, which tackles a flaw in Office that “could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Office document..or previews or opens a specially crafted email message in Outlook while using Microsoft Word as the email reader.”

This Office flaw, which is present in the latest versions of Office 2003 and Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, is already being exploited in targeted attacks, Microsoft said. According to the company’s advisory, this vulnerability was reported by Google. These attacks fit the profile of previous zer0-day incidents, which use targeted email lures and previously unknown vulnerabilities to break into high-value targets.

“When Google encounters flaws that exploit users’ computers, even when the flaws are in other companies’ software, we take strong action to mitigate those attacks,” a Google spokesperson said in response to a request for comment. “Based on the exploit and the way it has been utilized by attackers, we strongly believe the attacks to be associated with a nation-state organization.”

Adobe’s Flash and AIR updates also fix a critical bug that was reported by Google’s security team, although Adobe says it is not aware of any exploits or attacks in the wild against the vulnerability address in its update. The latest Flash version is 11.7.700.224 for Windows and 11.7.700.225 for Mac OS X.  This link will tell you which version of Flash your browser has installed. IE10 and Chrome should auto-update their versions of Flash. If your version of Chrome is not yet updated to v. 11.7.700.225, you may just need to restart the browser.

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Vrublevsky Arrested for Witness Intimidation

June 5, 2013
86 Comments

Pavel Vrublevsky, the owner of Russian payments firm ChronoPay and the subject of an upcoming book by this author, was arrested today in Moscow for witness intimidation in his ongoing trial for allegedly hiring hackers to attack against Assist, a top ChronoPay competitor.

Pavel Vrublevsky's Facebook profile photo.

Pavel Vrublevsky’s Facebook profile photo.

Vrublevsky is on trial for allegedly hiring two brothers — Igor and Dmitri Artimovich — to use their Festi spam botnet to attack Assist, a competing payments processor. Prosecutors allege that the resulting outage at Assist prevented Russian airline Aeroflot from selling tickets for several days, costing the company at least USD $1 million.

Vrublevsky was imprisoned for six months in 2011 pending his trial, but was released at the end of that year after admitting to his role in the attack. Later, he recanted his jailhouse admission of guilt. Today, he was re-arrested after admitting to phoning a witness in his ongoing trial and offering “financial assistance.” The witness told prosecutors he felt pressured and threatened by the offer.

Two months ago, I signed a book deal with Sourcebooks Inc. to publish several years worth of research on the business of spam, fake antivirus and rogue Internet pharmacies, shadow economies and that were aided immensely by ChronoPay and — according to my research — by Vrublevsky himself.

Vrublevsky co-founded ChronoPay in 2003 along with Igor Gusev, another Russian businessman who is facing criminal charges in Russia stemming from his alleged leadership role at GlavMed and SpamIt, sister programs that until recently were the world’s largest rogue online pharmacy affiliate networks. Huge volumes of internal documents leaked from ChronoPay in 2010 indicate Vrublevsky ran a competing rogue Internet pharmacy — Rx-Promotion — although Vrublevsky publicly denies this.

My previous reporting also highlights Vrublevsky’s and ChronoPay’s role in nurturing the market for fake antivirus or scareware products. One such story, published just days before Vrublevsky’s initial arrest, showed how ChronoPay executives set up the domains and payment systems for MacDefender, a scareware scam that targeted millions of Mac users.

I found this development noteworthy because I, too, was offered financial assistance by Vrublevsky, an offer that very much seemed to me like a threat. In mid-2010, after thousands of emails, documents and hundreds of hours of recorded phonecalls from ChronoPay were leaked to  this author, Vrublevsky began calling me at least once a day from his offices in Moscow. This continued for more than six months. In one conversation from May 2010 , Vrublevsky offered to fly me to Moscow so that I could see firsthand that he had “only a very remote relationship with this case.”

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FDIC: 2011 FIS Breach Worse Than Reported

June 4, 2013
142 Comments

A 2011 hacker break-in at banking industry behemoth Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) was far more extensive and serious than the company disclosed in public reports, banking regulators warned FIS customers last month. The disclosure highlights a shocking lack of basic security protections throughout one of the nation’s largest financial services providers.

fisJacksonville, Fla. based FIS is one of the largest information processors for the banking industry today, handling a range of services from check and credit card processing to core banking functions for more than 14,000 financial institutions in over 100 countries.

The company came under heavy scrutiny from banking industry regulators in the first quarter of 2011, when hackers who had broken into its networks used that access to orchestrate a carefully-timed, multi-million dollar ATM heist. In that attack, the hackers raised or eliminated the daily withdrawal limits for 22 debit cards they’d obtained from FIS’s prepaid card network. The fraudsters then cloned the cards and distributed them to co-conspirators who used them to pull $13 million in cash from FIS via ATMs in several major cities across Europe, Russia and Ukraine.

FIS first publicly reported broad outlines of the breach in a May 3, 2011 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stating that it had identified “7,170 prepaid accounts may have been at risk and that three individual cardholders’ non-public information may have been disclosed as a result of the unauthorized activities.” FIS told the SEC it worked with the impacted clients to take appropriate action, including blocking and reissuing cards for the affected accounts. “The Company has taken steps to further enhance security and continues to work with Federal law enforcement officials on this matter,” it declared in its filing.

FIS’s disclosure to investors cast the breach as limited in scope, saying the break-in was restricted to unauthorized activity at a portion of its network belonging to a small prepaid debit card provider that it acquired in 2007.  But bank examiners at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) who audited FIS’s operations in the months following the 2011 breach and again in October 2012 came to a very different conclusion: According to a report that the FDIC sent May 24, 2013 to hundreds of FIS’s customer banks and obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the 2011 breach was much larger than previously reported.

“The initial findings have identified many additional servers exposed by the attackers; and many more instances of the malware exploits utilized in the network intrusions of 2011, which were never properly identified or assessed,”  the FDIC examiners wrote in a report from October 2012. “As a result, FIS management now recognizes that the security breach events of 2011 were not just a pre-paid card fraud event, as originally maintained, but rather are that of a broader network intrusion.”

Indeed, the FDIC’s examiners found that there was scarcely a portion of the FIS network that the hackers did not touch.

“From review of the previous investigation reports, along with other documentation provided by FIS, examiners and payment card industry experts identified over 2,000 touch points that indicated a broad exposure of internal FIS systems and client related data,” the report notes. “These systems include, but are not limited to, the The New York Currency Exchange ATM network, prime core application systems, and various Internet banking, ACH, and wire transfer systems. These touch points also indicated approximately 100 client financial institutions, which appear to have had sensitive data exposed by the attackers.”

fdicsnip

A screen shot of an excerpt from the FDIC report on security lapses at FIS.

In an emailed statement, FIS maintained that “no client of FIS suffered any monetary loss as a result of the incident, and stressed that the report is based upon a review that was completed in October 2012.

“Since that time, FIS has continued to strengthen its information security and risk position, including investments over two years of $100 million or more, as part of our goal to provide best-in-class information security and risk management to each of our 14,000-plus clients. We have openly and regularly communicated these initiatives, our progress and results to our clients and shareholders through meetings, monthly updates, quarterly public disclosures, Board materials, educational webinars, and more.”

WHAT DOES $100 MILLION BUY?

Nevertheless, investors may be less than pleased about how FIS is spending its security dollars. The FDIC found that even though FIS has hired a number of incident response firms and has spent more than $100 million responding to the 2011 breach, the company failed to enact some very basic security mechanisms. For example, the FDIC noted that FIS routinely uses blank or default passwords on numerous production systems and network devices, even though these were some of the same weaknesses that “contributed to the speed and ease with which attackers transgressed and exposed FIS systems during the 2011 network intrusion.”

“Many FIS systems remain configured with default passwords, no passwords, non-complex passwords, and non-expiring passwords,” the FDIC wrote. “Enterprise vulnerability scans in November 2012, noted over 10,000 instances of default passwords in use within the FIS environment.”

The bank auditors also found “a high number of unresolved network and application vulnerabilities remain throughout the enterprise.

“The Executive Summary Scan reports from November 2012 show 18,747 network vulnerabilities and over 291 application vulnerabilities as past due,” the report charges.

What’s more, investigators probing the breach at FIS may have been denied key clues about the source of the intrusion because FIS incident response personnel wiped many of the compromised systems and put them back on the network before the machines could be properly examined.

“Many systems were re-constituted and introduced back into the production environment before data preservation techniques were applied,” the report notes. “Additionally, poor forensic preservation techniques led to numerous servers being re-imaged before analysis was completed and significant logging data was inadvertently destroyed. Several servers, key to the investigation process, were re-introduced into the production environment and subsequently re-compromised due to misconfigured baselines and inadequate security testing outside of corporate policy.”

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Cashout Service for Ransomware Scammers

June 3, 2013
32 Comments

There are 1,001 ways to swindle people online, but the hardest part for crooks is converting those ill-gotten gains into cash. A new service catering to purveyors of ransomware — malware that hijacks PCs until victims pay a ransom – levees a hefty fee for laundering funds from these scams, and it does so by abusing a legitimate Web site that allows betting on dog and horse races in the United States.

Ransonware scam spoofing the DHS to obtain Moneypak/unlock codes.

Ransonware scam spoofing the DHS to obtain Moneypak/unlock codes. Source: botnets.fr

Ransomware is most often distributed via hacked or malicious sites that exploit browser vulnerabilities.  Typically, these scams impersonate the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI (or the equivalent federal investigative authority in the victim’s country) and try to frighten people into paying fines to avoid prosecution for supposedly downloading child pornography and pirated content.

Ransomware locks the victim’s PC until he either pays the ransom or finds a way to remove the malware. Victims are instructed to pay the ransom by purchasing a prepaid MoneyPak card, sold at everything from Walgreens to Wal-Mart (some scams tell victims to pay using a PaySafe or Ukash card). Victims are then told to send the attackers a 14-digit voucher code that allows the bad guys to redeem those MoneyPak vouchers for cash.

Trouble is, taking funds off of a MoneyPak requires either spending it at stores that accept it, or hooking it up to a U.S. bank account, to PayPal, or to a prepaid Visa or Mastercard. What’s more, most miscreants who are even halfway competent at spreading ransomware can expect to collect dozens of MoneyPak codes per day, so cashing out via the above-mentioned methods simply does not scale well for successful bad guys (particularly those who live outside of the United States).

Last week, I stumbled on a ransomware cashout service hosted in Minsk, Belarus that helps simplify the process. It checks the balances of MoneyPak codes by abusing a feature built into betamerica.com, a legitimate and legal site where gamblers can go to bet on dog and horse races in the United States.  Specifically, the ransomware cashout service queries a page at betamerica.com that lets customers fund their betting accounts using MoneyPak.

I reached out to Betamerica.com’s operations team and spoke with a woman who would only give her name as “Leslie.” Leslie said the company had already flagged the account that was being used to check the MoneyPak voucher codes.

“This account was already flagged as some type of bot or compromise, and was set to non-wagering,” she said, explaining that this status prevents customer accounts from placing bets on races. Leslie said Betamerica scrutinizes the Moneypak activity because fraudsters have tried to use the codes to launder money.

“We are pretty diligent, because in the past we have had [individuals who] will try to do a Moneypak deposit and then do a withdrawal, basically trying to launder it. Bottom line is that money has to be wagered. It’s not going to be returned to you in another form.”

When I first encountered this ransomware cashout service and discovered the connection to Betamerica, I was sure the miscreants were trying to launder money through the betting site. But after my conversation with Leslie, the true scope of this ransomware operation began to come into focus. It appears to involve the cooperation of several sets of actors:

MoneyPak cashout scheme.

Scheme to cash out $300 MoneyPak vouchers obtained from ransomware victims.

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Underweb Payments, Post-Liberty Reserve

May 30, 2013
152 Comments

Following the U.S. government’s seizure this week of virtual currency Liberty Reserve, denizens of the cybercrime underground collectively have been progressing through the classic stages of grief, from denial to anger and bargaining, and now grudging acceptance that any funds they had stashed in the e-currency system are likely gone forever. Over the past few days, the top discussion on many cybercrime forums has been which virtual currency will be the safest bet going forward?

As I mentioned in an appearance today on NPR’s show On Point, the predictable refrain from many in the underground community has been that the demise of Costa Rica-based Liberty Reserve — and of eGold, eBullion, StormPay and a host of other virtual currencies before it — is the death knell of centrally-managed e-currencies. Just as the entertainment industry’s crackdown on music file-sharing network Napster in the late 1990s spawned a plethora of decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, the argument goes, so too does the U.S. government’s action against centrally-managed digital currencies herald the ascendancy of P2P currencies — particularly Bitcoin.

Fluctuation in BTC values. Source: Bitcoincharts.com

Fluctuation in BTC values. Source: Bitcoincharts.com

This knee-jerk reaction is understandable, given that private crime forums are now replete with postings from members who reported losing tens of thousands of LR dollars this week. But as some of the more seasoned and reasoned members of these communities point out, there are several aspects of Bitcoin that make it especially unsuited for everyday criminal commerce.

For one thing, Bitcoin’s conversion rate fluctuates far too wildly for communities accustomed to virtual currencies that are tied to the US Dollar: In both Liberty Reserve and WebMoney — a digital currency founded in Russia — one LR or WMZ (the “Z” designation is added to all purses kept in US currency) has always equaled $1 USD.

The following hypothetical scenario, outlined by one member of an exclusive crime forum, illustrates how Bitcoin’s price volatility could turn an otherwise simple transaction into an ugly mess for both parties.

“Say I pay you $1k today for a project, and its late, and you decide to withdraw tomorrow. You wake up and the $1k I just sent you in Bitcoins is now worth just $600. It’s not yet stable to be used in such a way.”

Another forum member agreed: “BTC on large scale or saving big amounts is a mess because the price changes. Maybe it’s only good cashing out,” noting WebMoney now allows users to convert Bitcoins into a new unit called WMX.

Others compared Bitcoin to a fashionable high-yield investment program (HYIP), a Ponzi-scheme investment scam that promises unsustainably high return on investment by paying previous investors with the money invested by new investors.  As the U.S. government’s complaint alleges, dozens of HYIP schemes had a significant amount of funds wrapped up in Liberty Reserve.

“Bitcoin is a trendy HYIP. There are far more stable and attractive currencies to invest in, if you are willing to take the risk,” wrote “Off-Sho.re,” a bulletproof hosting provider I profiled in an interview earlier this month. “In the legit ‘real products’ area, which I represent, a very small niche of businesses are willing to accept this form of payment. I understand the drug dealers on Tor sites, since this is pretty much the only thing they can receive without concerns about their identities, but if you sell anything illegal, WMZ should be the choice.”

What’s more, MtGox — Bitcoin’s biggest exchanger and the primary method that users get money into and out of the P2P currency — today posted a note saying that it will now be requiring ID verification from anyone who wants to deposit money with it in order to buy Bitcoins.

A logo from perfectmoney.com

A logo from perfectmoney.com

Perhaps the closest competitor to Liberty Reserve and WebMoney — a Panamanian e-currency known as Perfect Money (or just “PM” to many) — appears to have been busy over the past few days seizing and closing accounts of some of its more active users, according to the dozens of complaints I saw on several different crime forums. Perfect Money also announced on Saturday, May 25 that it would no longer accept new account registrations from U.S. citizens or companies.

For now, it seems the primary beneficiary of the Liberty Reserve takedown will be WebMoney. This virtual currency also has barred U.S. citizens from creating new accounts (it did so in March 2013, in apparent response to the U.S. Treasury Department’s new regulations on virtual currencies.) Still, WebMoney has been around for so long — and its logo is about as ubiquitous on Underweb stores as the Visa and MasterCard logos are at legitimate Web storefronts — that most miscreants and n’er-do-wells in the underground already have accounts there.

But not everyone in the underground who got burned by Liberty Reserve is ready to place his trust in yet another virtual currency. The curmudgeon-in-chief on this point is a hacker nicknamed “Ninja,” the administrator of Carder.pro — a crime forum with thousands of active members from around the world. Ninja was among the most vocal and prominent doubters that Liberty Reserve had been seized, even after the company’s homepage featured seizure warnings from a trio of U.S. federal law enforcement agencies. Ninja so adamantly believed this that, prior to the official press announcements from the U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday, he offered a standing bet of $1,000 to any takers on the forum that Liberty Reserve would return. Only two forum members took him up on the wager.

Now, Ninja says, he’s ready to pay up, but he’s not interested in buying into yet another virtual currency. Instead, he says he’s planning to create a new “carding payment system,” one that will serve forum members and be housed at Internet servers in North Korea, or perhaps Iran (really, any country that has declared the United States a sworn enemy would do).

ninjapost

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U.S. Government Seizes LibertyReserve.com

May 28, 2013
315 Comments

Indictment, arrest of virtual currency founder targets alleged “financial hub of the cybercrime world.”

U.S. federal law enforcement agencies on Tuesday announced the closure and seizure of Liberty Reserve, an online, virtual currency that the U.S. government alleges acted as “a financial hub of the cyber-crime world” and processed more more than $6 billion in criminal proceeds over the past seven years.

After being unreachable for four days, Libertyreserve.com's homepage now includes this seizure notice.

After being unreachable for four days, Libertyreserve.com now includes this seizure notice.

The news comes four days after libertyreserve.com inexplicably went offline and newspapers in Costa Rica began reporting the arrest in Spain of the company’s founder Arthur Budovsky, 39-year-old Ukrainian native who moved to Costa Rica to start the business.

According to an indictment (PDF) filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Budovsky and five alleged co-conspirators designed and operated Liberty Reserve as “a financial hub of the cyber-crime world, facilitating a broad range of online criminal activity, including credit card fraud, identity theft, investment fraud, computer hacking, child pornography, and narcotics trafficking.”

The U.S. government alleges that Liberty Reserve processed more than 12 million financial transactions annually, with a combined value of more than $1.4 billion. “Overall, from 2006 to May 2013, Liberty Reserve processed an estimated 55 million separate financial transactions and is believed to have laundered more than $6  billion in criminal proceeds,” the government’s indictment reads. Liberty Reserve “deliberately attracted and maintained a customer base of criminals by making financial activity on Liberty Reserve anonymous and untraceable.”

Despite the government’s claims, certainly not everyone using Liberty Reserve was involved in shady or criminal activity. As noted by the BBC, many users — principally those outside the United States — simply viewed the currency as cheaper, more secure and private alternative to PayPal. The company charged a one percent fee for each transaction, plus a 75 cent “privacy fee” according to court documents.

“It had allowed users to open accounts and transfer money, only requiring them to provide a name, date of birth and an email address,”  BBC wrote. “Cash could be put into the service using a credit card, bank wire, postal money order or other money transfer service. It was then “converted” into one of the firm’s own currencies – mirroring either the Euro or US dollar – at which point it could be transferred to another account holder who could then extract the funds.”

But according to the Justice Department, one of the ways that Liberty Reserve enabled the use of its services for criminal activity was by offering a shopping cart interface that merchant Web sites could use to accept Liberty Reserve as a form of payment (I’ve written numerous stories about many such services).

“The ‘merchants’ who accepted LR currency were overwhelmingly criminal in nature,” the government’s indictment alleges. “They included, for example, traffickers of stolen credit card data and personal identity information; peddlers of various types of online Ponzi and get-rich-quick schemes; computer hackers for hire; unregulated gambling enterprises; and underground drug-dealing websites.”

A Liberty Reserve shopping cart at an underground shop that sells stolen credit cards.

A Liberty Reserve shopping cart at an underground shop that sells stolen credit cards.

It remains unclear how much money is still tied up in Liberty Reserve, and whether existing customers will be afforded access to their funds. At a press conference today on the indictments, representatives from the Justice Department said the Liberty Reserve accounts are frozen. In a press release, the agency didn’t exactly address this question, saying: “If you believe you were a victim of a crime and were defrauded of funds through the use of Liberty Reserve, and you wish to provide information to law enforcement and/or receive notice of future developments in the case or additional information, please contact (888) 238- 0696 or (212) 637-1583.”

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