It’s been a hectic 10 days for the online poker community. On April 15th, the founders of PokerStars, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker were indicted, along with eight others, on charges that included money laundering, bank fraud, illegal gambling, and violating the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act UIEGA
Monitoring the situation has been the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association IMEGA, whose Chairman, Joe Brennan, told Poker News Daily that the situation was ripe for legal action to occur.
Brennan elaborated, “In some ways, it’s shocking. In some ways, it’s not a surprise. All the signs were there for the better part of two years. The DOJ has been doing what the DOJ does: working from the outside slowly in. They started with the little guys, got them to roll, and got everything they needed.”
Payment processors have largely been the targets of the Department of Justice in recent years and have included Account Services’ Douglas Rennick and Intabill’s Daniel Tzvetkoff. According to an article that appeared in Business Insider, information obtained from Tzvetkoff may have contributed to the drastic legal action 10 days ago.
Were the 11 indictments inevitable? Was it just a matter of time until the passage of the UIGEA and the eventual enforcement of its regulations resulted in a major legal strike from the US Dept of Justice?
To that end, Brennan noted that it was easy to say yes based on the results. However, he added, “When you look at how overt the fraud is alleged to be when it comes to not only recoding transactions, but also going allegedly so far as to coop banks, you’d have to say they were working on borrowed time. The only thing that I would say surprised me was the allegation about the bank in Utah
read entire article here
Monitoring the situation has been the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association IMEGA, whose Chairman, Joe Brennan, told Poker News Daily that the situation was ripe for legal action to occur.
Brennan elaborated, “In some ways, it’s shocking. In some ways, it’s not a surprise. All the signs were there for the better part of two years. The DOJ has been doing what the DOJ does: working from the outside slowly in. They started with the little guys, got them to roll, and got everything they needed.”
Payment processors have largely been the targets of the Department of Justice in recent years and have included Account Services’ Douglas Rennick and Intabill’s Daniel Tzvetkoff. According to an article that appeared in Business Insider, information obtained from Tzvetkoff may have contributed to the drastic legal action 10 days ago.
Were the 11 indictments inevitable? Was it just a matter of time until the passage of the UIGEA and the eventual enforcement of its regulations resulted in a major legal strike from the US Dept of Justice?
To that end, Brennan noted that it was easy to say yes based on the results. However, he added, “When you look at how overt the fraud is alleged to be when it comes to not only recoding transactions, but also going allegedly so far as to coop banks, you’d have to say they were working on borrowed time. The only thing that I would say surprised me was the allegation about the bank in Utah
read entire article here