PokerStars

bluffs while millions of viewers watched the live broadcast. The timing of “Black Friday” was particularly surprising because it looked like online poker was about to become fully legalized fairly soon. In fact, government-operated online poker was legalized within the District of Columbia just 8 days prior to the Black Friday indictments! In addition, Nevada introduced a bill one month earlier for legal and regulated online poker. That bill didn’t even prohibit Nevada residents from playing with foreign online poker companies such as PokerStars. This time around, the Nevada casino industry supported this kind of legislation. Steve Wynn had previously been publicly opposed to online poker, but PokerStars and Wynn Resorts announced a partnership with plans for a website, PokerStarsWynn.com on March 24, 2011. One week later, Full Tilt Poker announced an agreement with Fertitta Interactive which owns Station Casinos. However, the PokerStars/Wynn and Full Tilt Poker/Fertitta partnerships were obviously discontinued after Black Friday indictments ensued just weeks later. On Capitol Hill, former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was probably the most vocal critic of the crackdown on Internet poker. He labelled it “an incredible waste of resources” and noted how the Obama administration had prioritized illegal gambling, instead of prosecuting the banks involved with the fraud leading to the financial crisis. Frank has been a strong ambassador for legalizing and regulating…

method (Pataki). Pataki illustrates the idea of a money mule as “a person hired by a terror or criminal organization to open a bank account and Internet poker account under a legitimate identity.” Another person playing against the money mule will show him his cards and the challenger purposely loses the money (Pataki). This money gets transferred into the mule’s bank account and used to fund criminal or terrorist groups (Pataki). Money laundering falls under of one of many criminal activities.…