Recent Posts
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Feds seize billion-dollar poker domains
Five domain names associated with online poker sites have been seized by the FBI as part of an investigation that has also seen 11 people indicted.
The principals of PokerStars, Absolute Poker and Full Tilt Poker, along with third-party “payment processors”, stand accused of engaging in a massive money laundering scheme in order to accept billions of dollars of payments from American gamblers in violation of US laws.
The charges carry possible maximum sentences of between five and 30 years in prison, along with substantial monetary fines. Two men have been arrested, a third is due to be arraigned, and the remainder are currently outside of the US, according to a press release (pdf).
The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said five domain names have been seized by the FBI in connection with the prosecutions.
It’s not yet clear which domains have been seized.
From where I’m sitting in London, absolutepoker.com already shows an FBI warning banner, but pokerstars.com and fulltiltpoker.com both resolve normally. I may be receiving cached DNS data.
Blogger Elliot Silver, sitting behind a resolver on the other side of the pond, reports that ub.com is among the seized domains.
Unlike previous recent seizures, which were carried out by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, this time the FBI appears to be the responsible agency.
And this time, these aren’t two-bit file-sharing forums or Chinese knock-off merchandise sites, we’re talking about businesses that are perfectly legal in many jurisdictions, clearing billions in revenue.
But according to US Attorney’s charges, the companies carried out an elaborate plan to cover up the sources of their revenue through third parties and phoney bank accounts.
The companies are even alleged to have made multi-million dollar investments in failing banks in order to get them to turn a blind eye to the illicit gambling activities.
It appears that the FBI went straight to the .com registry, VeriSign, as some of the affected domains appear to be registered through UK-based corporate registrar Com Laude.
If you’re wondering whether this is yet another confirmation that all .com domains are subject to US jurisdiction, this is your takeaway sentence, from Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara:
Foreign firms that choose to operate in the United States are not free to flout the laws they don’t like simply because they can’t bear to be parted from their profits.
The suits seek $3 billion in allegedly ill-gotten gains to be returned.
Yes, that take-a-way sentence seems to indicate that it’s not really a jurisdiction thing. It’s that these companies deliberately worked with US customers to circumvent the law.
yep, i’m in the uk and all those sites are showing the fbi holder
i updated the screenshots at domaintools to show if cached for you
jesus!
one thing i have always wondered is if you run a major poker operation online, i know the U.S has draconian laws on this basically to protect the offline poker emporiums and casinos and lobbyists just line the governments pockets to do this
its a joke
so are these companies meant to block all U.S visitors then somehow?
i mean there’s 2 ways of looking at it, the online poker sites don’;t come into peples homes, the punter comes to them
it sounds as if theres more to this story but one upshot is i think cctld gambling domains just went up in price and the coms went down. what you reckon?
All the sites listed here simply show up in Opera as unreachable and a Google mini screen shows alternative sites. I suspect more and more gambling sites will become .co or other cctld’s (international) domains.
Pokerstars now available at http://pokerstars.eu 🙂
The .com still works here. I need to switch DNS providers.
[…] Feds seize billion-dollar poker domains […]
Haven’t heard any update on this? Any recent news?