Here’s the latest from Reason magazine on federal agents’ raid on Liberty Dollar users here in Asheville:
Updating from the previous post on the topic, the FBI did indeed raid the Liberty Dollar office in Indiana on Wednesday. Documents filed in U.S. District Court in North Carolina indicate that the raid was the culmination of a two-year undercover investigation of Liberty Dollar and its officers.
According to an affidavit (PDF) filed by FBI agent Andrew Romagnuolo in support of a federal seizure warrant obtained from a U.S. Magistrate last week, the feds have been investigating Liberty Dollar not just for violating federal bans on circulating alternative currency, but also for mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.
As for the mysterious connection to the Western District of North Carolina, the document names William Innes of Asheville as a Regional Currency Officer for Liberty Dollar and an executive committee member of the company. Undercover government agents made Asheville a focus of their investigation as a result, attending area meetings of Liberty Dollar prospective buyers and sellers.
The affidavit further details Liberty Dollar’s structure and terms it a “multi-level marketing scheme.” The FBI claims the company realizes a profit by selling the Liberty Dollars into circulation. The feds also went back to October 2002 for bank records of Liberty Dollar principals and cite large sums of cash moving between accounts said to be controlled by those individuals.
There’s more here at a Washington Post blog about presidential candidate Ron Paul’s connection:
The Indianapolis branch of the FBI declined to comment on the raid and referred calls to the U.S. Attorney’s office for Western North Carolina in Charlotte. That office’s spokeswoman, Suellen Pierce, also declined to comment. But bloggers at the libertarian Reason Foundation posted on-line a 35-page copy affidavit for a search warrant filed last week with the Western District in Asheville laying out the government’s case against National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Codes (NORFED.) Pierce said that the search warrant in the case had been accidentally made public by a court clerk and has since been sealed, under court rules.
In the affidavit, an FBI special agent states that he is investigating NORFED for federal violations including “uttering coins of gold, silver, or other metal,” “making or possessing likeness of coins,” mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. “The goal of NORFED is to undermine the United States government’s financial systems by the issuance of a non-governmental competing currency for the purpose of repealing the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Code,” he states.
The agent states that the investigation started two years ago. And the U.S. Mint a year ago issued a warning against using the Liberty Dollar, prompting a lawsuit by NORFED. But that has not kept Liberty Dollar fans from speculating on-line that the raid was prompted by Paul’s strong campaign — which recently raised more than $4 million in a single day — or by the precipitous recent decline in the value of the dollar.
The Mountain Xpress had this.
8 Comments
i wonder if my mortgage company will accept payment in Liberty Dollars…. ha ha
…I guess i could pay my kids’ allowance in Liberty dollars- those little scrappers won’t know the difference. Heck, it’d just be cheaper to buy a Monopoly refill pack. And get this- Monopoly money would be more widely accepted!
What’s AVL?
Yeah, but Libery Dollars are not just coins.
You see a lot of actuall paper liberty dollars.
And that means your paying for worthless paper that is insentially backed by good wishes and crossed fingers, and it is barely accepted anywhere.
So you just spent actaul money to buy fake paper money with NO intrinsic value whatsoever and no backing.
You pay about twice the price of the bullion if you buy an actual metal "medallion". That is (or should be, it was to me) clearly explained before you purchase it. More often, you would buy the certificates and pay the premium for the safekeeping of of the gold and silver backing it (unless a really good thief, like the US government, comes along.) I happened to sell a silver piece to a friend of mine, coincidentally enough, a couple of days before all of this happened. I told him what it was actually worth, and he still bought it at face value, because the price in US dollars for that silver will shortly go up quite a bit, unfortunately.
More at the Carpetbagger report:
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/13632.html
People don’t just hand out Liberty dollars.
Somewhere along the line you have to turn some of your actual money into this sparsely used bartering note or coin.
The scam is, you have to pay for Liberty Dollars. And you pay way more than it costs for these people to print out some cheap fake money.
I don’t know about the debt-clearing thing so I can’t speak as to that, but I do know a bit about the Liberty Dollar. How is it a scam?
I’m no fan of the IRS or the government’s "right" to tax income, but about damn time that this fraud was nixed. There are a lot of other connections to this story not out yet, but the ringleaders of this group in AVL also ran a debt clearing scam that cost many people tens of thousands of dollars right here in town. I’m one of them. Yes, I am totally liable for being duped, but good that this flow of horseshit hucksterism posing as "economic freedom fighters" is no longer able to keep their game going by getting mired in this, too.