E-gold's Proven Commitment To Fighting Child Pornography Payments

After years of hearing about e-gold's commitment to fighting child pornography, like many others, I was surprised to see allegations relating to that area of e-gold's payment business.

So I decided to go back and do some reading and I have to say I'm shocked that anyone could fashion that opinion. Its simply unbelievable. Here are selected quotes from the transcript testimony of Dr. Jackson, Chairman of e-Gold, before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. This testimony took place on Thursday, September 21, 2006.

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations: thank you for the opportunity to participate in these hearings. The problem of child pornography on the Internet is a serious one, and I am pleased to see the full involvement of the federal government, nongovernment organizations, and private industry. Working cooperatively will certainly help us all in the goal to eradicate this heinous crime from the Internet.


I would also like to applaud Ernie Allen and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) who have spearheaded the effort to bring together this financial coalition. Our aim, along with the NCMEC, is to curb the flow of payments to these criminals and to help identify perpetrators and their activity so that law enforcement can take appropriate action. We strongly support the NCMEC’s goal to eradicate child pornography on the Internet, and I would like to add my thanks to my colleagues in this coalition.

e-gold has over 3 million accounts in more than 165 countries and has the credibility of significant tenure, having been in operation online for almost 10 years. All e-gold in circulation is backed 100% by a reserve of physical gold in London Bullion Market Association member repositories. Currently, reserves amount to nearly 3.6 million Fine Grams of gold, which would place e-gold 76th among countries for the value of gold reserves. At today’s gold exchange rates, this reserve is valued at over $68 million USD. Since its inception, e-gold has settled over 67 million individual transactions and is today processing 50,000–70,000 account-to-account transfers per day, valued at over $2.0 billion USD annually.

e-gold is Not Hospitable to Illicit or Criminal Activity

All online payment systems are subject to the attempts of individuals to use them inappropriately, whether for acceptance of illegal funds, money laundering, or other illicit activity. e-gold’s unique features and investigative protocols make it the poorest choice a criminal could make. e-gold is not a major payment system for Child Pornography.

At the beginning of 2004, e-gold investigators received a small number of third-party reports that proved to be real cases of CP sites accepting e-gold. As these sites were identified, they were blocked, along with all associated accounts. Recognizing the problem was real and growing, e-gold began to reach out to third-party watchdog organizations to help in the alert process. This reaching out was frankly very difficult: e-gold was not well known or understood, and often, responses from these third parties were limited. e-gold did increase its in-house investigative activities and continued efforts with law enforcement. In mid 2005, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children initiated their work that led to this financial coalition, which has helped significantly. e-gold is very proud to be one of the founding members of this very worthwhile coalition.

During this time period, e-gold received adverse press that came close to implying complicity in this problem, but it was press that was not justified. Based upon the financial size of the CP trade identified by the NCMEC and our review of historical transactions, e-gold has been the payment mechanism abused in less than one hundredth of one percent of the CP payment dollar volume since this problem surfaced. The NCMEC CyberTipLine sends alerts to Financial Coalition members, and alerts are received from other third-party sources as well. Since collaborative efforts started, the activity has decreased dramatically.

When an alert is investigated, 95% of the time the account has already been identified and blocked through e-gold’s own internal investigative efforts, almost always detected upon the first payment or before a single payment has been received.

e-gold investigators estimate that 90-95% of the alerts received are for CP websites for which e-gold has already blocked the applicable account.

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