Friday, October 15, 2010

Moneybookers cancels Wikileaks account on institutional 'blacklisting'

The British (but Bahraini owned) Internet money-transfer firm suspended the account that Wikileaks used to collect donations. Apparently this has been triggered by the inclusion of the whistleblower site in a US watchlist and an Australian blacklist (whatever these terms mean).

On August 13, the company emailed Julian Assange saying that:

Following an audit of your account by our security department, we must advise that your account has been closed (...) to comply with money laundering or other investigations conducted by government authorities.

After the Moneybookers' regional manager, Daniel Stromberg, investigated what was wrong, he was told:

Hi Daniel, you can inform him that initially his account was suspended due to being accessed from a blacklisted IP address. However, following recent publicity and the subsequently addition of the WikiLeaks entity to blacklists in Australia and watchlists in the USA, we have terminated the business relationship.

Later official replies by their public relations firm were not informative at all.

Source: Uruknet.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please, be reasonably respectful when making comments. I do not tolerate in particular sexism, racism nor homophobia. The author reserves the right to delete any abusive comment.

Comment moderation before publishing is... ON