RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Bank Of The Underworld’

recommendedreading1UPDATED 12:12 P.M. EDT U.S.A. A thoughtful reader sent this along this morning. It’s a story by Jake Halpern in The Atlantic titled, “Bank of the Underworld[:] Liberty Reserve was like PayPal for the unbanked. Was it also a global money-laundering operation?”

Here’s a snippet (italics added):

Costa Rica was also increasingly known as a place where dirty money could be cleaned. The country’s geography—with drug producers to the south and their customers to the north—was ideal for money launderers. According to Global Financial Integrity, a nonprofit that monitors international money laundering, Costa Rica exported $5.4 billion in laundered money in 2006, equivalent to 24 percent of its GDP. By 2012, that number was up to $21.6 billion—a whopping 48 percent of GDP. Ólger Bogantes Calvo, the deputy director of the country’s anti-narcotics enforcement agency, told me that the government simply never has the funds, manpower, or materiel to fight the criminal elements it faces. “Realistically, [the criminals] will always be a step ahead,” he said.

Liberty Reserve, the choice of HYIP Ponzi schemers and other criminals, is DOA, of course. Post-Liberty Reserve, however, it might be a good time for investors and prospects of SVM Global Initiative to question why a purported arm of the New York City-based enterprise extends into Costa Rica.

Such a question might help educate the MLM/network-marketing masses who continue to push one bizarre scheme after another. After all, the highly publicized Liberty Reserve case was brought in the Southern District of New York, the same venue in which SVM appears to be operating with a purported “professional intuitive” at the helm.

SolidTrustPay, an offshore processor that had been friendly to the AdSurfDaily and Zeek Rewards Ponzi schemes, reportedly is in the SVM fold. (In a complaint announced April 14, the SEC said a Ponzi scheme known as CashFlowBot and perhaps better known as DollarMonster was using STP.)

While they’re at it, MLMers/network marketers might want to question why SVM appears to be contemplating a “advertising” module of some sort.

And they also might want to question why AdSurfDaily “advertising” Ponzi schemer Andy Bowdoin allegedly once hopped on a plane and ventured to Costa Rica.

Meanwhile, they might want to question why cross-border schemes such as TelexFree ($1.8 billion) and Zeek Rewards ($897 million) had “advertising” components.

Speaking of “advertising”: The emerging MAPS cross-border scheme has the word in its name — along with promoters’ ties to Zeek and TelexFree. Like Zeek and ASD, MAPS, short for My Advertising Pays, says it takes SolidTrustPay.

 

 

 

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One Response to “RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Bank Of The Underworld’”

  1. I strongly believe that Budovsky’s “wife” is now lying that the marriage was no bona fide, it is clear they do not speak even same common language. And now that she says they only had sex in hotels, she never been to his house and does not know of his wealth or business. Budoovsky is gay (which i knew, but prefered someone else to leak his marriage with Gleb).

    Common, that woman is lying not to end up in jail for marriage and immigration fraud. We all remember what she was saying in past.