Monday September 23 ,2013 : ONLINE POKER MILLIONS DIVVIED UP BY U.S. ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES
SunFirst Bank and other seized accounts yield $13.62 million for FTC and DoJ.
The respected investigative online poker journalist Haley Hintze, who's pursuit of the truth in the Absolute Poker and UltimateBet debacles provided her readers with a slew of in-depth information, has been digging again…and this time she has unearthed an interesting by-blow on the series of e-cash processing prosecutions surrounding the Black Friday shut downs of leading online poker sites back in 2011.
Accessing court documents, Hintze has discovered that the $13.62 million contents of four seized accounts at Utah's SunFirst Bank, which featured prominently in internet poker processing cases, and resulted in banking executive prosecutions, have been split between the Federal Trade Commission and US Marshals working for the US Department of Justice.
And four further accounts seized at other banks may be in line for similar treatment.
Prior to the federal enforcement actions of Black Friday in April 2011, the now notorious US businessman Jeremy Johnson was allegedly involved in brokering multi-million dollar processing deals for market leading online poker companies like Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars – the 2009 SunFirst deal was, it is claimed, one of his arrangements.
But he was also being watched by the Federal Trade Commission regarding the activities of his iWorks and other companies, where the feds claim in a $275 million case that there were contraventions of laws against telemarketing fraud and other felonies.
Following the closure of online poker processing activities at SunFirst by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation late in 2010 , the FTC commissioned a company called Robb Evans and Associates to seize Johnson's assets as it pursued his other transgressions.
Hintze describes the results of subsequent investigations in commenting that Robb Evans and Associates uncovered "…massive commingling of accounts between Johnson’s iWorks and online-poker operations, both of which connected to dozens of corporate shell accounts controlled by Johnson and his associates. In all, more than 61 corporate entities were uncovered by the Robb Evans search, which involved a warrant being served on a Jeremy Johnson-run office location in January of 2011."
It is alleged in the over a thousand pages of court documentation that Johnson and his staff moved significant sums of money into accounts associated with online poker transactions and other businesses, and also deposited millions of dollars into personal accounts.
In her article on the seizures and subsequent division of the spoils, Hintze details the SunFirst accounts, along with other accounts which may be the subject of future profitable splits for federal agencies.
Read the full story here:
http://www.4flush.com/online-poker-news/unreported-corner-ftc-dips-into-sunfirst-bank-online-poker-funds-snags-6-9-million/14851