Hola mis amigos!
Right about now I should be receiving tons of money since I – OK, only in a way, but still – had predicted this week’s greatest online tragedy. Didn’t I tell you that last week’s silence was nothing but an ominous sign of things to come?
I did, didn’t I? And did you listen to me, amigos? I honestly hope so. I hope that you had caught wind of what was going on with Liberty Reserve, the biggest story this week, and took the necessary precautions.
No new programs to introduce this time, amigos. It’s been tough, as you know, so we’re going to concentrate on the Liberty Reserve issue, which is a story that keeps on giving, unfortunately. Let’s go back and see what exactly happened.
We started the week with an article on the possible demise of Liberty Reserve since LR’s website wasn’t working for a couple of days and the rumors about its owner arrest kept on spreading.
LIBERTY RESERVE DEAD, OWNER ARTHUR RUDOVSKY ARRESTED?
First of all, what has to be said is that it’s not the first time such malfunction has appeared. However, usually a similar situation seemed planned, because LR had informed the users beforehand on its blog or, in instances when it was simply an unforeseen fault, such piece of information would appear in a matter of hours. What is different this time is that neither the website, nor the official blog – which, by the way, was not working properly for some time as well – provide us with any kind of update on the situation.
The domain, libertyreserve.com, is practically not even resolving DNS names into the IP addresses.
Here’s the up-to-date whois information:
Domain Name: libertyreserve.com Created On: 2001-07-27 Expiration Date: 2018-07-27
Registered via: XS Global Trade & Service B.V. Registrant Name: Allan Garcia
Registrant Organization: Liberty Reserve S.A. Registrant Street: Edificio 4 Registrant City: Santa Ana Registrant Postal Code: 1000 Registrant Country: cr
Registrant Phone: +506.88462868
Name Server: ns1.sinkhole.shadowserver.org
Name Server: ns2.sinkhole.shadowserver.org
As you can see, what we seem to have here is a major change of DNS servers from dynect.net to sinkhole.shadowserver.org. Furthermore, the owner of the shadowserver.org is The Shadowserver Foundation, which is known as an agency fighting cybercrime. Thus, the question remains, whether the FBI has taken over Liberty Reserve’s domain since such rumours were appearing each time LR failed to perform in the past. Why should it be anything more than gossip this time? Because as soon as LR’s website went down, the news coverage started suggesting that LR’s owner, Arthur Budovsky, was in fact arrested.
According to the sources such as ticotimes.net and teletica.com, as a result of Spanish and Costa Rican police cooperation regarding an investigation into money laundering, Arthur Budovsky was taken into custody on May 24 in Spain. What’s more, as ticotimes.net and teletica.com claim, Budovsky’s Costa Rican estate, offices, servers, documents, computers and telephones were also secured by the police.
The case against Bydovsky, a Costa Rican citizen born in Ukraine, was launched in 2011 by the New York district attorney. Due to the fact that Budovski’s business was supposedly thought to have been financed by child pornography websites and drug trafficking, the major focus seemed to be the payment processor and its financing. What still seems unclear, however, is whether Arthur Budovsky is, in fact, the owner of Liberty Reserve.
2 days ago we wrote 
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