An illegal gambling ring with more than 2,000 bettors in the United States moved millions of dollars through banks and credit card companies and used an overseas website to place the wagers and keep the accounts, the office of the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, said on Wednesday.
A Queens County grand jury indicted 17 people in the case, and all but three are in custody. The arrests were made by law enforcement officials in New York, Nevada and California, where most of the bookmakers and accountants for the ring were based, the office said. The head of the operation was identified as Cyrus Irani, 37, of Santa Clarita, Calif.
Mr. Brown said the ring had collected $32 million in illegal bets on football, basketball, baseball, hockey and other sports. He said Internet gambling was “a multibillion-dollar, worldwide industry.”
“Internet gambling has been compared by some to the crack cocaine epidemic of the late ’80s and early ’90s,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “It is highly addictive.”
6 comments:
You will always have degenerate gamblers.
If this is so addictive and terrible, why not shut down the "racino"?
We have a lottery system that is just preying on the poor.
"A dollar and a dream"
The poor do not pay income taxes, so this is how the government shakes down the poor for money.
The lottery system "for the children's education" is a total SCAM!
Yes the money goes to education, BUT for every dollar it gets from the lotto system, our wonderful legislators take away education funding. So it is just more of your money for the powers that be to pass away!
If DA Brown wants to bust a real scam, lock the entire NYS gaming and lottery commission up.
The only problem is that the government isn't getting its cut.
Hypocritical???
Go to the local bar, see the bookie, and keep the money in the local economy...
This is a waste of resources. As long as we have sports, their will always be gambling attach to it. Legalize it and tax the hell out of it.
I pass many small storefronts that house shops that sell unimaginable amounts of all Lottery games, cigarettes, vapor cigarettes, cigars, porn magazines, shady phone cards, condoms, synthetic pot and perhaps a newspaper or two.
The government loves these places.
TBK
"...tax the hell out of it."
Please realize the never ending "unintended consequences" of Government intervention.
All you do is create a black market.
As I keep saying the more money the government gets, the more it wastes and then some!
It never works out.
How did prohibition work out?
We even have a cable show dedicated to the current moonshiners.
How is Atlantic City doing?
That was the cure all for New Jersey's fiscal woes.
IMHO it is a sewer.
How much marijuana is sold without getting taxed in Colorado?
Ask Eric Garner how the NYS/NYC tobacco taxes affected him...
Where are you John Stuart Mill? Consensual acts are not the law's business. Abe Lincoln said " A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which this nation was founded." Leave the gamblers alone to find out whose opinion is better,or simply whose luck,for the moment,seems more charged with magic. Let the law pick targets worthy of its might. What can be the virtue in antigambling laws which oppose those games that offer relief from the drabness of some lives? John Tugboat and Richard Sasuly
"Internet gambling has been compared by some to the crack cocaine epidemic"
When emaciated gambling addicts are stumbling though every subway station begging for change, and are mugging and murdering people by the thousands for gambling money, then it'll be like the crack epidemic.
Usual government scaremongering.
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