In principle it doesn't matter what coin it was; their MSB rules are the same in any case, and they've done it with Bitcoin before.
How else could I rent an SMS service to talk to someone who's being prosecuted, without being targeted just for daring to talk to him? Without having to rely on a company not to secretly give my information out behind my back, even if they weren't actually legally required to?
If people want any sort of alternative to credit card payments and bank transfers, it has to have the privacy features of Monero. Open-ledger coins are even worse. People have recently been kidnapped and murdered for having too much Bitcoin, which anyone was able to see.
These are minimal SMS exchanges, and the feds are probably reading them in real time. I asked if he was able to use email + PGP, and he said no. I haven't said who I was, I'm just anon asking for the Internet.
I would also like a comprehensive list of prior enforcement actions.
FinCEN has this, https://www.fincen.gov/news-room/enforcement-actions
If that's really all they've done, it's been quite rare.
In Eric Powers' case (2019), they seized all his data, fined him $35k, and forced him to sign an agreement that he wouldn't act as an MSB again. Sounds like they thought a jury would be sympathetic, and so they couldn't go for much in a plea bargain. They list only two other MSB enforcement actions since then.
Now that people seem to be pulling their cash-by-mail ads on localmonero, I was thinking that something I'd like to have would be a site that has the same sort of escrow and dispute resolution infrastructure, but with private ads. If you already have contacts, you want to keep buying during "p2p winter", and you know someone who wants to keep selling, you can tag each other, make accounts, and one party puts up a private ad which is only visible to specified other parties.
It turns out that localmonero sort of supports that already. If you go to make a new ad, there is an option to make it for trusted users only. So you can mark each other trusted and make a private ad with arbitration protection that way.
I'd like to see a finer-grained version of this where you just specify users that can view a specific ad, and don't have to worry about what 'Trusted' does today. Obviously your trust level is not 100%, which is why you'd like the escrow service to keep both of you punctual.
If you're going to salt your current localmonero account because you've traded with someone who's getting prosecuted and you want to keep your past trades with them from being slurped, remember to exchange PGP keys with everyone you've already traded with before you hit the big red button, so you can verify your identity with each other afterwards.
I would also like to see a feature on private ads, that once the trade is finalized, with the agreement of both parties, the trade chat and all other information about the trade can be expunged immediately. No waiting six months, and no record of the trade whatsoever. Just escrow while you need it and then it's gone.
Records said he has been released. I gave him a link to this site, suggested he make an account, and asked if there was anything he wanted me to tell people.
Thanks. I'm safe and unavailable for trades, and working with the pretrial services office of the US District Court for the Central District of California to get trades on Agoradesk/LocalMonero. I'm barred from "social media apps" but not under a gag order. Thanks for letting people know.
People have been relying on the notion that "Selling peer-to-peer isn't illegal." The problem with that is, that as soon as you are trading regularly, or making a profit, they are going to say that you are in the business of it instead, and therefore have to be a licensed money-service business, keep records, and perform full KYC on your customers.
Biggest current US cash-by-mail trader on LocalMonero (LetterGuy21969) arrested by feds June 9th
I noticed because I was trying to start a trade with him. Possibly I'm the first person on the internet to notice, and it's right when r/Monero and r/CryptoCurrency are dark because of the Reddit protest, so it's difficult to warn people. I see r/xmrtrader is still up; I may make a burner account and post it there, or someone else is welcome to.
http://nehdddktmhvqklsnkjqcbpmb63htee2iznpcbs5tgzctipxykpj6yrid.onion/nojs/user/LetterGuy21969
He formerly had agoradesk and localmonero accounts under his real name for years. About 5 months ago he deleted them and created the current pseudonymous account. He has quite a web presence under his real name, and is a crypto "OG", active in Bitcoin since at least 10 years ago. He often had the lowest price for XMR via cash by mail (~4% above the rate on CoinMarketcap) and would accept trades up to $10k.
He recently set his account to require trade requests to be approved by him before becoming live, and since a few days ago (06.08), he stopped responding to trade requests or trade chat, but his ad was still up. LocalMonero makes it easy to go on a 'Buying vacation' with one click, so that was odd. His profile still said "Last seen just now" until 3 days ago, which suggests he had a keepalive script. I tried to SMS text him via an anonymous provider and received no response.
So, I was thinking, dead, arrested, or hospitalized? Or maybe just on vacation? OpticBit recently died. Hospitalized but unconscious? People typically have their phones with them in the hospital these days. Arrested? I started checking for death and arrest records, which has to be done on a county by county basis. There were no such records in his home county, but he still wasn't responding to texts. This morning, I tried another neighboring county, and found that he was listed as in custody, arrested by the US Marshals, who execute federal warrants, booking date and time June 09 2023 13:00, no charges listed yet, but listed as ineligible for bail.
If you have traded with him, you have his name and address and can confim this. I'm not sure that I should publicly dox him in the process of warning people, but it will likely become public soon enough, and I can provide it to moderators for verification. Find a map of his state, find the large county directly to the north of the one where he lives, find their arrests & booking records web site. Find his age or DOB via a people search engine. Search with his name and age, and the arrest record comes up. I have a screenshot of it.
If you have traded with him, consider your position, because the feds now have his computers, cell phone records, sms texts, any records he kept, potentially his localmonero account password to view all his prior trades and trading partners (they do have a 'delete my account and all information' option which trading partners can use), any postal mail that was still in his possession, and likely records of inbound tracking numbers, and possibly scans of parcels.
The US government is suddenly declaring war on crypto. Everyone's answer to how to buy Monero without invasive KYC has been "Just use LocalMonero, cash by mail." LocalMonero have a massive ad at the top of r/CryptoCurrency ever since Binance delisted XMR in Poland, Spain, France and Italy a few days ago. Maybe they were a tad overconfident in raising their profile so much? I had been thinking that it would be rather easy to shut down cash by mail onramps - all you have to do is make a trade request and the sellers send you their address, and then you arrest them for operating an illegal money service business. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to give them ideas, but it seems that they are already doing it.
Screenshot of his current terms of trade for posterity in case LocalMonero remove it: !
