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Comment by cochne | Hacker News Reader

Here is a more to-the-point article. https://www.unionleader.com/news/crime/free-keene-leaders-ar... Feds allege it was a money laundering operation.

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They were misrepresenting their enterprises as "churches" and telling their customers to report their transactions as "church donations". So it looks like the fraud, wire fraud etc. charges might stick.

how long until Bitcoinism is accepted as a religion? If Scientology could do it, Bitcoinism should be too,seems to have far larger budgets.

Feds allege that about every unregulated crypto exchange of any kind.

It does seem like this particular business was relying upon legal hacks and obscurity more than following the established rules for financial firms, probably for ideological reasons.

Remember that time a guy printed up certificates for redeemable precious metals then got rectally destroyed by the feds?

I do not. Do you have a link to more information about this?

Look up egold.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curr...

I don't know, this seems like straight up money laundering versus just operating in a grey area of the law. They setup a tax-exempt church and ran over $5M through it. Now I think driving an armored vehicle into this guys house was excessive but I don't think he's innocent either.

> Feds allege it was a money laundering operation.

Feds also routinely mislabel anyone they don't like.

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