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BetOnSports Founder Pleads Guilty To Racketeering
Hugh Pickens writes "The founder of Internet- and telephone-based gambling operation BetOnSports has entered guilty pleas to three US charges, including a racketeering charge, and will forfeit $43.7 million to the US government as part of a plea agreement. Beginning in the mid- to late-1990s, Gary Kaplan set up businesses in Antigua and later Costa Rica to provide sports betting services to US residents through web sites and toll-free telephone numbers. Those numbers terminated in Houston or Miami, and were then forwarded to Costa Rica by satellite transmitter or fiber-optic cable. Some of Kaplan's web servers were located in Miami and were remotely controlled from Costa Rica. People became customers by depositing money in a BetOnSports account. By 2004, the BetOnSports organization's principal base of operations in Costa Rica employed about 1,700 people, had nearly one million registered customers and accepted more than 10 million sports bets. Now bankrupt, BetOnSports took in $1.25 billion in 2004, with 98 percent of that revenue coming from bets made through its web site by clients in the United States. 'Gary Kaplan made millions of dollars by making it too easy for people to gamble away their hard-earned money without having to leave their homes,' said FBI agent John Gillies. 'Today's guilty plea should have a lasting effect because Kaplan was not only the founder of BetOnSports, he was also one of the pioneers of illegal online gambling.'"
I am a statistician (says my degree at least). Yet, on occation, I buy a lottery ticket and visit a casino. Fully aware that my chance to win is minimal compared to the chance that I lose. It's a game. It's fun. It's a cheap little thrill. It's nothing I'd put my last 5 bucks on.
The problem isn't so much that people engage in gambling. It's not really a problem unless you plan to make money that way. As long as you see it as a pastime and realize that it's basically a pastime like so many others where you pay to do it, from playing paintball to collecting stamps, there's no problem.
It becomes a problem when people live in the delusion of having a "system" to beat the house and make money that way. It does not work. It simply cannot. If there was such a thing as a "system", casinos and lottery company would have folded a long time ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The World Trade Organization has found in favor of Antigua, and states that the US is in violation of the law by making online gambling illegal just because it wants to protect its brick and mortar casinos...
However the US threatens others with the UN, WTO, sanctions, military force when it wants to, and ignores those organizations when they become "inconvenient". And then Americans wonder why they are hated everywhere. That's ok, keep printing those dollars (the Federal Reserve is now the biggest purchaser of US treasuries - imagine that), propping up that bubble and lying to the public with imaginary "inflation" and "employment" figures, America. The whole house of cards will come down soon enough.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
He did leave the US shortly after the law was passed changing the legal status of his business. He's one of the guys where his flight between non-US destinations had an "emergency" and the DOJ "arrested" him at an "international" location outside the gates of US Customs.
I always find it funny that it's OK for US corporations to leave when they don't like Taxes, Environmental laws, Labor laws, Executive responsibility laws, to places like Bermuda, China, Taiwan, Honduras, running their US business into the ground and wrecking jobs for tens of thousands, but his little "gambling" site involved the need to conduct international sting operations and illegally divert aircraft.