by Matthew Glanfield

It appears that e-gold is having major problems. With the combination of 12DailyPro reporting problems with e-gold hackers to a recent FBI raid on their premises due to money-launderers, e-gold is in the middle of quite the controversy.

I cannot reproduce the article found in Business Week here as it is copyright, but the general idea is the following:

1. E-Gold does not force its members to prove their identity. This means that anybody can make up a fake name and open an account.

2. There are quite a few money-launders and terrorist-funders that use e-gold (and other online currencies) in order to fund their operations.

3. E-Gold officials were accused of not cooperating with the FBI and other organizations that wanted more information on certain users of the e-currency.

There were many more allegations as well, and there have been many rumours as well.

The problem here is that it is hard to tell fact from fiction. I suggest going to http://www.e-gold.com/letter.html and reading the response from the owner of e-gold.

How does this affect you?

Well, if you have an e-gold account with any significant amount of funds you might start to feel less secure about this e-currency. I don't think that they will be going anywhere, but in order to best protect yourself I would suggest inxchanging those funds into DXGold.

Also, you need to be very careful when it comes to security. Make sure that you have all your security settings set to their highest in your e-gold settings in order to prevent the most problems.

You can also read more about security here.

Now this is actually a good thing in my opinion!

While the government may not always have the best ways of doing things, by them moving in on IntGold and E-Gold they are showing that they are aware of the e-currency arena. This will help to bring more publicity to the general public about e-currencies (remember, even bad publicity is good publicity).

Also, this will force other e-currencies to crack down on their security. This leads back to my previous article on Which E-Currency Should You Use?.

Lastly, I am happy to see that even though DXSynergy is not based in the states they have already taken the security measures of using the Virtual Keyboard and also of verifying the personal identity of all of their users seriously. This shows that they are not just a one or two-man operation that is liable to be shut down from external pressures. This definitely boosts my confidence even more.

So in the end you should do your own research on e-gold to formulate your own opinion. Make sure you read both sides of the story (i.e. e-gold's and the FBI's) so that you can get the full picture.

Visit our forums for the latest updates regarding e-Gold!

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