Busting Scams - From HYIPs to Identity Theft Insurance

I sent an innocent message to my friends at moneybookers asking if one could use their escrow service in e-currency exchange transactions.  I had noticed the need online for such a service since ordinary people often find the need to make exchanges between e-currencies, but don't know each other well enough to trust each other.  Moneybookers provides such a service for most goods, so I thought this would be a no-brainer.  NOT! 

I was informed that the use of moneybookers to perform exchange transactions was not permitted.  Huh.  I can withdraw money from moneybookers into my checking account, withdraw it in cash, go exchange it for whatever, go back to my bank, and deposit it, then reload it into my moneybooker account.  My bank will charge me a fee for the currency exchange, but it's possible nontheless.  In fact, any reasonable bank or service (including moneybooker) will accept incoming foreign currencies and exchange them to your native currency.  What is up with these policies?  Paypal's is even more restrictive (surprise), including lots of undefined uses of the term "certain ____."  As in you can't do some kinds of transactions for "certain purposes" or for "certain cases" or "certain products or services."   Who is supposed to know for certain (lol) what is allowed or not?

I would think that the government would want these transactions to occur within reputable companies so that they could be traced, tracked, and regulated.  The idea being that most exchange transactions are for innocent reasonable purposes.  If someone is doing something wrong, that has nothing to do with what kind of currency they are using.  By forcing exchange transactions outside the mainstream, there is more opportunity for abuse.  The transactions of concern are going to happen no matter what, it's just a question of whether they will be detectable.

What is completely clear is that this is all about liability of individual companies.  No one wants to be the company raided by the FBI because one of its customers turns out to be a bad guy, financing drugs or terrorism.  This is what happened to E-gold and it has not been a pretty picture.  I'm sure moneybookers realizes that if they don't handle the transaction, it will still happen anyway.

But this just makes no sense to me.  The natural response of the ecurrency businesses is to flee outside the jurisdiction of countries that threaten them.  We now see c-gold which looks like an e-gold knock-off, and while it supposedly has no relationship to e-gold by ownership in common or direct party relationship, I don't think c-gold was created from dust.

One would think that it is in the interest of governments worldwide to keep e-currency companies on-shore where they can be monitored and regulated (if need be).   Certainly keep them close enough so that if need be, a warrant can be served to find out what a particular bad guy is doing.

Of course, this kind of misjudgment on the part of the Bush administration is not surprising.  But Moneybookers is an OFFSHORE (Jersey UK) company, and is itself an e-currency!  Baffling.  Can someone please explain it to me?  Post a comment, please.