BusinessInsider.com just published a article entitled “Meet The Boy Genius Who Just Took Down The Online Poker Industry” citing a story published by Australia’s Courier-Mail newspaper.
The article tells the story about an Australian, Daniel Tzvetkoff “who set up the payment processing schemes used by the biggest poker sites to handle their (mostly illegal) transactions”.
According to the story Mr. Tzvetkoff was arrested last year in Las Vegas and “charged with the same crimes those sites’ founders were charged with today: money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud. As an Australian citizen with a lot of cash, he was considered a flight risk and denied bail.”
It seems that Mr. Tzvetkoff cooperated with the Feds to avoid his own lengthy jail sentence.
According to the story, Tzvethoff involvement started when one of the sites that got charged yesterday originally complained to US law enforcement that Mr. Tzvetkoff had stolen money form them and was in the US and could be arrested.
All and all a very interesting story and you can read it all here.
FBI shuts down poker sites in online gambling crackdown
boingboing.net/2011/04/16/fbi-shuts-down-poker.html
One can definitely see the temptations that arise from the dark side.
There’s a LOT of money to be made working in the gray areas- or the outright black ones- but when the photo of a beaming ‘entrepreneur’ standing beside a Ferrari is shown alongside the one of him in shackles and an orange jumpsuit standing before a judge, you have to wonder if it was worth it… especially after the forfeiture procedures are over.
All those who have gambling domains will be charged too as accessory to the CRIME-directly or indirectly.
Having gambling domains is not illegal at all. Just because most US states don’t allow it you should know that many places, especially in Europe, do have laws for it, so having gambling domains, or being an affiliate, is not a crime at all. I’m not an US citizen, I don’t promote to US players, and the companies I promote are established in European countries. I live a few hours away from the UK, Gibraltar or Malta, where local governments do give rights for a few companies to have online gambling websites. William Hill is just one of the biggest examples, both offline and online.
You have to know what you are doing, not promoting anything illegal, but putting “gambling” generically in the same bag is not correct.
This is an area I know pretty well, so if you have any doubts please contact me.
We have no freedom or choices in the US, just the false belief in them.
Other than “paper of plastic” of course.
The US isn’t the only country with strict gambling laws, even in Europe there are some that tried to do it, but that situation has been avoided because EU law states that any country member of the European Union may do business in all the others, hence avoiding those local monopolies in gambling…
“A fool and his money are soon parted.” 1587 J. Bridges Defence of Government in Church of England xv. 1294
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/a-fool-and-his-money-are-soon-parted#ixzz1Jt8OlYFk
Gambling is getting legalized in Asian countries now. Recently in Sri Lanka gambling legalized by a parliament act. Think about India & china. Those are not good markets for now, But they will grow or US investors will find a loophole in the law to do gambling offline and online. I don’t think gambling domain investors will loss there investments.
Great story. Intrigue and international illegal business operations involving internet gambling… smells like a movie script to me. It will be interesting to see how the internet gambling ‘industry’ reacts to the increasing pressure.
FYI, A little editing needed on the last paragraph.
This might be the end of the road for the seniors. Young players are now dominating the world of poker.