Privacy Oriented

First Digital International Bank (FDIB) was an offshore bank licensed in Montenegro in 2000 that ended up offering anonymous bank accounts to virtually anyone who wanted one. FDIB’s principals decribed the bank as a “private internet offshore banking solution offering the finest in high-interest paying offshore banking, also exchange provider for gold backed digital currencies, anonymous cash cards.” An excellent concept, I thought. Here I will explore what happened to this bank and its ties to Privacy.li and PrivateGoldTrader.com.

I opened many accounts with FDIB in 2005 and 2006, but I never funded the accounts. That is only because I did not have money to fund them at that time, or I would have. I was glad to see there was a bank with balls out there… They offered account funding by bank wire transfer or by e-currencies, such as e-gold, Pecunix and 1mdc - back in the good ol’ days, before e-gold and 1mdc were worthless. In mid-2005, PrivateGoldTrader started accepting “paper based instruments” on behalf of FDIB for easy account funding with cash, money orders or bank drafts (aka casheir’s cheques).

I never ran across a bad report about this bank from anyone - until it went offline. That lead me to assume they operated with integrity up until they stole most clients’ money (I assume). I read one report saying as much about his account on PowerPrivacy’s forums.

What follows here is a report I wrote about the bank’s demise for the site’s entry on AboutUs.org. For some reason, you later needed an account to access the information because it had been deemed as “Adult” content. That doesn’t make any sense, but here it is, out in the open…

First Digital International Bank (aka “1st Digi Bank”) has been suspected of being fraudulant, and the website is currently down as of Novemebr 1, 2006. First Digital International Bank was an internet bank offering anonymous accounts to clients, run by an unknown group, possibly based in Eastern Europe or Russia (this is a guess based on their handling of the English language and a few other factors), from 2000 to late 2006. The bank originally had a banking license from the government of Montenegro, which (illegally) canceled all licenses of their offshore banks in 2002. First Digital International Bank, however, carried on their business with a new twist; they decided to offer anonymous accounts requiring no ID and use “trustee” accounts instead of bank correspondent accounts. According to 1st Digi Bank, they would accept clients doing any type of business accept ones that engaged in scams or fraud. The bank used the MacroBanker 4 software. In 2006, they updated their bank license page claiming they had fought in court three times with the government of Montenegro over their license and the issue had still not been resolved. They further claimed that they had been issued banking licenses by the government of North Korea (yeah, right!) and the government of the successionist Somali state of Puntland, which is where their new phone number had been routed to.

The bank had ties of some sort with Adminus, the admin of www.privacy.li, (although it is pretty doubtful it was run by him), as he promoted the bank and perhaps hosted their servers, and he was/is, by his own admission, friends with “Jorge Amanda”, the man who ran/runs PGT (PrivateGoldTrader.com), who also promoted the bank. Interestingly, one of PGT’s addresses for sending money to is/was an address in Canada (care of “Privacy Consultants”) also used by a notorious internet scammer named “Georg Adem” for his company, “Financial Privacy Consultants.” Many people on the internet accused Adminus of helping or even being Georg Adem; Adminus maintains that Adem was merely his client for a short time and he does not have any dealings with Adem. Strangely though, according to their website, Financial Privacy Consultants (privacy-consultants.com), the company headed up by Adem, “merged with Privacy.li“. Adminus also claimed to have money held by 1st Digi Bank, but was mum about what happened to his money when the bank went offline / closed its doors. PGT claimed to have been issued a gold trading license by the “privacy loving finance minister from Somaliland.” Somaliland is a break-away state within the territory of what is traditionally thought of as Somalia.

In September or October of 2006, the bank claimed, in a message to clients through their online banking console, that a large deposit had been made into their “trustee account” (under the company name “DrebaForexManagement”) at a Lithuanian bank, which was exchanged for e-gold and sent to their client’s e-gold account from whom the deposit was made. Apperantly, the deposit was from money obtained by fraud, and 1st Digi Bank’s “trustee” account was closed by the Lithuanian bank (which presumably kept the deposits) after 1st Digi Bank had already sent the e-gold to their client, thus 1st Digi Bank lost a large amount of money in the transaction. 1st Digi Bank claimed that they did not know if the bank would be able to carry on, but they would soon (by the end of 2006) have new “trustee” accounts in the likes of Dubai in the UAE, or another middle eastern country to which clients could then send bank wire transfers. After a few weeks, the site was taken offline and never came back. Up until mid-2007, however, a mirror of the site could be found at https://www.privategoldtrader.com (notice the https, not http), but the mirror lacked the ability to log into an account or open a new one. At least some people who had money in their accounts at 1st Digi Bank never saw their money again or heard from the bank representatives again, ie. 1st Digi Bank stole their depositors’ money when the site went offline.

The people at PGT (privategoldtrader.com), who accepted paper payment instruments (cash, cheques, money orders, etc) on behalf of 1st Digi Bank starting in late 2005, claimed that the people behind 1st Digi Bank were fed up with problems with their accounts due to criminals using their bank to accept the proceeds of fraudulent transactions, and could not find a workable solution to the problem yet. They mentioned that perhaps 1st Digi Bank reps could still be found on FreeNet.

• posted by Anonymous on November 2, 2007