Tax day — which is today, in case you forgot — is the day to hate the government the most. Which means it’s also a good time to go ahead and hop online and blow off some steam by playing online poker.
Until today anyway — the government just seized five online poker domains, including UB.com, PokerStars.com, and FullTiltPoker.com and charged the guys who run three companies (Full Tilt Poker, Pokers Stars and Absolute Poker) with fraud.
"As charged, these defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. "Moreover, as we allege, in their zeal to circumvent the gambling laws, the defendants also engaged in massive money laundering and bank fraud. Foreign firms that choose to operate in the United States are not free to flout the laws they don't like simply because they can't bear to be parted from their profits."
Sigh. Should we be excited, the government’s spending money chasing down people who are robbing idiots out of the money they’re handing to the internet in order to play a game of chance?
I say no, in the same way that no one could have possibly been excited about the outcome of the Barry Bonds trial — there’s a massive disagreement in Washington, D.C. right now about how to balance the budget. This exists because our government is in a whole heap-load of debt.
There’d still be a problem budgeting if we weren’t in debt, of course, but things become much more contentious when you don’t have enough money. And one of the reasons we don’t have enough money is that we’re throwing piles of it away at things that the people of America don’t give two craps about.
To wit: the guys who ran Wall Street into the ground weren’t being pursued for “fraud,” or at least not like this. They were given golden parachutes with which to glide over foreclosed homes and poop nickels on our heads just for fun.
Also: the Bonds thing. TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS were spent chasing down an obvious steroid user in an attempt to nail him for perjury, only to see him get “busted” on obstruction of justice (don’t even get me started on how ridiculous this is — he just didn’t answer a question directly).
Fraud’s no good and I’m all for the government stopping the people who defrauding people. But this is ONLINE GAMBLING. What was anyone who engaged in this expecting? If you hop online and lose enough money on online blackjack that you can’t afford to pay your mortgage this month, that’s not you getting defrauded by some rich jerk who happens to trade on one of society’s favorite vices, that’s just Darwinism taking hold.
And of course this all happens on the day in which many of us spend freaking out about money owed to the government. Money which, I’m sure, they’ll find a fantastic and totally efficient use for spending.
DOJ Charges Three Major Online Poker Sites With Fraud – [Bluff Magazine]