Online gambling is a great way for you to make a lot of money with very little time and money. Thankfully for the online gambling bosses, it seems that they too can make a lot of money from this industry. However, when the country you’re in bans online gambling altogether, making money seems to require taking some less than legal ways.
Unfortunately, in the United States, this is exactly what most of the large online poker sites did, and on Friday, the 15th of April, it seems like all hell broke loose, and Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, UB poker and PokerStars were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Justice, and close to three billion dollars were seized from the companies. No less than eleven people were indicted following these actions, and the domain names for these pokersites were seized by the FBI. Even now, if you’re to visit the home pages of Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars or Absolute Poker, or even UB Poker, you will find that instead of the regular main page, you will be redirected to a message from the United States DoJ.
As it turns out, the whole investigation is several years old. One more notable incident unfolded precisely one year ago, on the 15th of April, when a key member in the whole money laundering operation conducted by the online poker site heads was arrested in Las Vegas, when he arrived in order to attend a gambling convention. Daniel Tzvetkoff, the internet entrepreneur in question, faced up to seventy-five years in prison, and apparently he was more than willing to co-operate with the authorities. Right now, there are many key members of the online poker industry who are facing up to thirty years in prison. These people are Isai Scheinberg, Paul Tate (both of Poker Stars), Nelson Burtnick and Raymond Bitar, Full Tilt Poker’s managers, and Brent Beckley and Scott Tom, from Absolute Poker. No matter how the events unfold from here on in their cases, it seems highly unlikely that American players will get the chance to play in these online poker rooms from now on, at least until the legislation is changed so that online poker becomes a hundred percent, fully legal.
Whatever the case, one thing is for sure: this Friday, the whole online poker world took a turn for the worst, suffering a great blow.
