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Is the online money instantly sent to your bank or did people store their winnings to play online only to lose it in the end?
Pokerstars.com, Fulltilt.com, and AbsolutePoker.com
The U.S. Attorney for New York has indicted the founders the three largest online poker companies in the U.S. and seized their websites in a major crackdown on internet gambling.
The indictment charges eleven defendants — including the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker — with bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling offenses.
In addition, the domains for FullTiltPoker.net and AbsolutePoker.com have been seized by the FBI and replaced by this pleasant reminder that gambling is illegal.
The indictment essentially spells out a scheme by the poker companies to set up phony bank accounts to process illegal gambling transactions, either by lying to the banks about the nature of the transactions or by targeting struggling banks to who need the money to stay afloat.
In addition to the criminal charges, the US Attorney filed a civil suit seeking $3 billion in damages. The FBI froze 75 bank accounts and seized five websites, in addition to the arrests that were made today.
The bank and wire fraud charges carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison
Meet The Boy Genius Who Just Took Down The Online Poker Industry
The internet is still coming to grips with the huge online gambling bust that just took down the U.S.'s three biggest online poker sites.
But Australia's Courier-Mail already has the scoop on the one man who may have single-handedly built the online industry ... then handed it to the U.S. government on a platter.
According to this story, Daniel Tzvetkoff was a young Australian entrepreneur who set up the payment processing schemes used by the biggest poker sites to handle their (mostly illegal) transactions.
He made Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars millions of dollars — and making as much $150,000 a day for himself — but then got even more greedy and started taking them for himself. They sued him, demanding more than $100 million of their own money back.
Then last April, Tzvetkoff was arrested 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 wealth, he was considered a flight risk and denied bail.
Then after a "secret" meeting with prosecutors, he was suddenly out on bail. And now, his former colleagues are the ones facing serious jail time.
Daniel Tzvetkoff knows the operations of these poker site inside and out. He's the one man positioned to give these companies to the U.S. Attorneys on a silver platter. And it looks like that's exactly what he did, cooperating with the authorities to avoid his own lengthy jail sentence.
All the major gambling prosecutions in the U.S., since Tzvetkoff's arrest have been run out of the office of Arlo Devlin-Brown, the Manhattan Asst. U.S. Attorney, who is Tzvetkoff's "handler."
According to a source, "He knows how to reverse-engineer transactions to determine its original source," making him very valuable to investigators.
And the biggest irony of all? It's been rumored that the only reason the FBI got their hands on him is because Full Tilt or Poker Stars (the companies he used to work for and stole from) tipped off the FBI that he was going to be traveling to the United States
They ratted him out ... and he turned the tables. No honor among thieves.
And as the Courier Mail put it, if this were still the old days, he'd buried in the Las Vegas desert right now.
Is the online money instantly sent to your bank or did people store their winnings to play online only to lose it in the end?
BTW this is a US thing only.
America YEA
They took a gamble and lost. I bet they have some good attorneys though.
Haha... isn't this ing country great? They go after Barry Bonds, after online poker, and meanwhile not a goddamn person faces jail time for all the fraud that plunged this nation into another depression.
Eagerly awaiting Manny's meltdown...
The people will get it back at some point.
I swear such a crock of . The sad thing is that earlier this year we were the closest we've ever been to having an actual bill pass congress to get things done.
I have played online maybe 3 or 4 times in the past 6 months and all I had was something like 50 bucks on Full Tilt but this still makes me sad. I had several great years off of Full Tilt, Pokerstars and Party Poker.
I thought about using pokerstars.com a couple of years ago.
...
I guess I made the right decision.
Nah man, I cashed out a while ago. The games started getting way too rocky and with school + a real job it was too hard to find time to actually review hands and play.
I was thinking about retiring my le which refers to Bill Frist passing UIGEA but I think now I'll keep it awhile longer.
I'd jumped into a 10 or 20 dollar MTT tournament lately when I had a few hours to kill but otherwise I've played far more live (living close to a bunch of casinos makes that more attractive anyway) than online.
I had a friend who had $80,000 seized last time the ing government went after the poker sites. He handled it way better than I would have.The people will get it back at some point.
I swear such a crock of . The sad thing is that earlier this year we were the closest we've ever been to having an actual bill pass congress to get things done.
I have played online maybe 3 or 4 times in the past 6 months and all I had was something like 50 bucks on Full Tilt but this still makes me sad. I had several great years off of Full Tilt, Pokerstars and Party Poker.
I had 10,000 in Neteller when they seized that. Took me 6 or so months to get that money. But I got it.
I can only imagine the meltdown currently happening at 2+2.
It is fairly epic.
I cannot withdrawl or play on Pstars right now. I dont have a lot of money there, less than 100 bucks, but know some people with some significant cash that are sorta freaking out.
Yeah - you know Geddy don't you? I wonder how much he's got online. The forum servers for 2+2 are taking FOREVER to load right now.
yea they are blown up...it took forever to read a few pages of the thread going on about it...now i cant get it back online.
I messaged Getty on facebook and, yea, he and his buddies are sorta paranoid right now. Hopefully they can get it off eventually, but even so, i couldnt feel comfortable leaving that much cash there, unless there were explicit words from the DOJ that they were deemed legal. If this isnt the end, it is only a matter of time. Speaking of Getty and his buds, A lot of these guys have no real career or education...so if the online gig is up, their gig is up, so to speak.
I know he plays pretty big lately, plays almost all of the big weekly tournies on tilt and stars...im guessing his online roll has to be able to handle that.
It'll also be interesting to see how this affects the turnout at the WSOP this year with it being right around the corner. I'd imagine if the poker sites stay shut down for any extended period of time, which seems highly like at this point, you'll see attendance in all of the events plummet without the online sites running constant satellites.
good. now i wont have to see their lame ads all over espn.
Unbeavable
Poker bots invade the virtual casino(CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO ARTICLE)The people will get it back at some point.
I swear such a crock of . The sad thing is that earlier this year we were the closest we've ever been to having an actual bill pass congress to get things done.
I have played online maybe 3 or 4 times in the past 6 months and all I had was something like 50 bucks on Full Tilt but this still makes me sad. I had several great years off of Full Tilt, Pokerstars and Party Poker.
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Not sure I would *ever* do online gaming.
, if I didn't have any scruples, I would be partnering with some Chinese hacker/programmer right now to do just that kind of thing. Easy money.
Yeah man - I hope he was smart and had a good portion of his roll offline so he still has money. He'll be able to get that money back but it might take some time. I have no doubts they'll get the money back from these sites.
Bots are a problem in Limit hold em and they have been for quite some time. No Limit hold em is much harder to program for and a known bot can be VERY easily exploited. Yeah, it was becoming an issue though.
No doubt.
the fbi.
This. America is such a ing joke. LOL @ people who lost money from their online poker accounts though. It got to the point years ago where it was too much of a headache to deposit money.
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