Abstract
Two long-term digital currency exchange agents created Liberty Reserve digital. Both men, Arthur Budovsky and Vladimir Kats, had worked in digital currency since the late 1990s. Liberty Reserve evolved alongside dozens of other digital currency companies the pair had acquired through the years. After being arrested in Brooklyn and charged by the State of New York for the unlicensed operation of a money transmitting business, Arthur Budovsky moved to Costa Rica and formed Liberty Reserve S.A. Continuing to offer unregulated and unsupervised financial services from Central America, the company became a substantial money-laundering criminal service. It was eventually closed and seized by US agents, under provisions created by the USA PATRIOT Act. Arthur Budovsky’s legal appeals from prison include claims that the business was not a money transmitter.
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Mullan, P.C. (2016). Liberty Reserve. In: A History of Digital Currency in the United States. Palgrave Advances in the Economics of Innovation and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56870-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56870-0_6
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56869-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56870-0
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