BetOnSports Founder Pleads Guilty To Racketeering 223
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.'"
Re:Lottery, Stock Market, Gambling--All Sucker Gam (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Lottery, Stock Market, Gambling--All Sucker Gam (Score:4, Interesting)
The owners, the loan sharks, the payday lenders, the cops, the employees, the hookers, the blackmailers ...
As for the stock market, it's legalized gambling only if you're too small to control the market. That's why the small fish get eaten alive every pull-back.
Re:Lottery, Stock Market, Gambling--All Sucker Gam (Score:3, Interesting)
If you can count 6+ decks, you can make more money with "honest" work...
Despite the fact that (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:His mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Victimless crimes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Humans are volitional beings. Our very definition is "rational animal". We have free will and choose every one of our actions. We own our own bodies and our minds and thus we are "free" by nature.
Therefore, if we develop an addiction to a substance or to a behaviour we have only ourselves to blame. The notion that fully grown adult human beings need a babysitter to make sure they don't hurt themselves is the most offensive concept ever known to man. And the most dangerous threat to freedom and liberty, which means the most dangerous threat to life itself. Freedom is a requirement of life. We are given our lives as a "gift of nature" but we are not given the means to sustain it. In order to sustain our lives we need to engage in certain actions. This is the concept of freedom and "rights". Rights are any behaviour that one might engage in to promote his survival and happiness. That means that no one has the ability to interfere with any action that I may choose to engage in, so long as I'm not interfering with another's ability to do the same. If that means doing something silly like excessive gambling then that's my own business.
Psychological addiction to any behaviour or chemical is an evasion of personal responsibility, and ultimately a choice. Furthermore, it is not the "responsibility" or "duty" of anyone else to support, babysit or treat the person. All attempts to do so are ultimately doomed to fail anyway. Being a result of personal choices to begin with, the only successful "treatment" for addiction is the individual making a personal choice to make alternative choices. This is why a person who is addicted is not a "victim", and why treating him/her as such is a gross breach of the concept of self-ownership, and thus freedom.
Re:Who was he hurting? (Score:3, Interesting)
In any case, the IRS is not the primary motivation for these suits. In most cases, it appears the existing gambling interests that are fighting to keep their monopolies alive and safe from free market competition. They want to control the online gambling as they do the offline [casinogamblingweb.com]. Competition that might increase the payouts to consumers and cut profits are just not in the cards, so to speak.
Re:Who was he hurting? (Score:2, Interesting)