The Israeli casino gambling newspaper Haaretz reports that a formal model agent and two accomplices were arrested last week on charges of operating an online casino, but that questions have been posed on the legitimacy of the case against them.
Asi Vaknin was named as the main suspect internet casinos, with Naftali Goldman and Yonatan Grimberg also detained by police from the police International and Serious Crimes division.
All three are suspected of money laundering, and Vaknin may also face charges of making threats. The three men are on bail until a further court appearance this week after a remand judge remarked that further evidence needed to be adduced.
Haaretz reports that police questioned Vaknin for several hours at the International and Serious Crimes Unit offices in Lod, but he maintained his right to remain silent.
Last Friday morning, the three suspects appeared at a remand hearing before the duty judge, Esther Nachlieli-Khayat, at the Rishon Letzion Magistrate’s Court.
During the hearing, the suspects’ attorneys, Sasi Gez and Sharon Nahari, asked for proof the business in question was not legal or different from Internet gaming sites, the Haaretz report continues, quoting Gez as saying:
“The company in question has licenses. Everything is public and visible. Weren’t you in a hurry to make arrests?” Gez asked the police representative, who responded that they were in the initial stages of the investigation.
The judge also expressed doubts on whether Vaknin had broken the law.
At one point, she said: “Tedi Sagi [the reported owner of the Playtech company that provides software for online gambling sites] was my neighbor. I am somewhat familiar with the subject. What is the difference between him and the suspects before me?” .
The lead investigator in the case, Superintendent Alon Shaharbani, replied that some of the activity took place in Israel, and that police had to arrest the suspects to catch them in the act and compare their stories.
However, legal representative Nahari told the court that several huge companies, including Sagi’s, had offices in Tel Aviv’s Azrieli office tower and are “traded on the London Stock Exchange for billions of dollars, and other companies give a legal license from the right governments to those seeking it.”
Haaretz reported that Nahari also said that as long as Israeli gamblers are blocked from a gambling Web site, and the site is managed abroad, operating such a site is no crime.
The judge said legal questions in the case “spanned the globe” and needed to be answered before the case moves ahead.
Details are currently awaited on a casino news flash that a player hit a $113 940 jackpot in an online gambling session on Cryptologic’s table game Caribbean Stud Poker in the wee small hours of a online gambling weekend morning.
It has not yet been confirmed, but it is believed that the big win was achieved at Intercasino.
In a blast from the past, late Friday the Kahnawake Gaming Commission published its final report on the UltimateBet online poker scam which took place more than three years ago, confirming that cheating did occur on the Tokwiro Enterprises subsidiary online poker site, and that former World Series of Poker main event champion Russell Hamilton was primarily responsible, although some 31 other individuals were associated in varying degrees with one of online pokers biggest cheating scandals.
It was an expensive affair for Tokwiro, which ended up disbursing $22 million to players prejudiced by the hole card scandal, and had to pay a further $1.5 million in fines to the KGC. Added to that has been the cost of the investigation, and the undoubtedly significant amounts of budget that Tokwiro has had to allocate to rebuilding its reputation.
KGC Chairman Dean Montour drew a line under the debacle in stating: “Despite the unfortunate circumstances that resulted in this cheating, we are satisfied that the actions taken by the Commission provided an equitable result for affected players - our first priority.
“We remain optimistic that this experience and the lessons learned from it will result in a higher standard of gaming regulation for companies licensed and regulated within the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake and elsewhere,” Montour added.
The 11 page report confirms that certain parties had the ability to view hole cards, and this was enabled by illicit software placed on the UltimateBet servers prior to November 2005. A third party account was then used to view players’ hole cards and the information passed on to the other players in on the scam.
The user names on the accounts maintained by those responsible were changed often in an apparent attempt to avoid detection.
The 1994 WSOP Main Event champ Russell Hamilton is again named by the Commission as the individual it believes primarily responsible for the cheating, adding that 31 other unprincipled individuals were associated in varying degrees with Hamilton when the alleged cheating took place.
Names were not released to the public in the report, which will not please many in the industry who have been calling for all involved to be publicly named and shamed.
23 accounts with 117 different usernames were used to facilitate the cheating and the money was disbursed using player-to-player transfers on the site, the report discloses, adding that since the incidents UltimateBet has taken significant steps to modify its control systems to prevent cheating and other improprieties in the future.
The Kahnawake authorities have provided full details of its detailed investigation - including the identities of all those involved - to Canadian law enforcement authorities, who will determine whether criminal charges should be laid against one or more of the individuals involved, the report concludes.
Prior to the UltimateBet scandal, similar cheating allegations had been investigated against UltimateBet’s sister site Absolute Poker.com, resulting in that site having to pay a $500 000 fine to the KGC.