| > Kumbhani is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodity price manipulation, operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. If convicted of all counts, he faces a maximum total penalty of 70 years in prison. Liberty Reserve operator Arthur Budovsky is serving his 20 year prison sentence, Kumbhani will likely serve 40+ years. Liberty Reserve wasn't even incorporated in US or did a lot of business after getting booted but that didn't stop it from being used as money laundering. Tether isn't very much different, LR/E-gold both tried various forms of insulation (LR not providing fiat on-ramp/off-ramp but through "verified" 3rd party). In the end, the trail of money and cui bono ultimately indicted Arthur for facilitating money laundering and subverting US banking system. It's very likely that DOJ and other three letter agencies are utilizing Tether/Bitcoin/Monero as a honeypot to gather intelligence on the parties. Imagine the wealth of information they are sitting on after capturing the hard drives of darknet marketplaces like Alphabay which were allegedly used to trace a former YC alumni's stolen Bitcoins. Tether is a well known cable for moving money out of China and into real estate markets in the West, it's ironic that so many do not see the complete geopolitical ramifications: housing affordability has been hijacked to facilitate money exfiltration in authoritarian countries by the elites in the West, to make cheap goods. In the West, lower and middle class unwittingly traded affordable housing for affordable consumer goods produced by authoritarian labor control and the beneficiaries of this were able to move their wealth out of reach from the same authoritarian government. Now that the musical chairs is ending, the same demographic in the West are being encouraged to become unwitting exit liquidity for the upper class. I predict this would have destabilizing effect on societies all over the world, especially countries that are over-leveraged and buying crypto on margin. |