As you have probably notices, the Liberty Reserve’s website has not been working for a couple of days. Since the users of this most popular payment processor have been wondering what is going on behind the curtains, money-monitor is there to shed some light on the problem.

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.