Meet The Boy Genius Who Just Took Down The Online Poker Industry
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But Australia's Courier-Mail already has the scoop on the one man who may have single-handedly built the online industry ... then handed it to the U.S. government on a platter.
According to this story, Daniel Tzvetkoff was a young Australian entrepreneur who set up the payment processing schemes used by the biggest poker sites to handle their (mostly illegal) transactions.
He made Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars millions of dollars — and making as much $150,000 a day for himself — but then got even more greedy and started taking them for himself.
They sued him, demanding more than $100 million of their own money back.
Then last April, Tzvetkoff was arrested in Las Vegas and charged with the same crimes those sites founders were charged with today: money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud. As an Australian citizen with a lot of wealth, he was considered a flight risk and denied bail.
Then after a "secret" meeting with prosecutors, he was suddenly out on bail. And now, his former colleagues are the ones facing serious jail time.
Daniel Tzvetkoff knows the operations of these poker site inside and out. He's the one man positioned to give these companies to the U.S. Attorneys on a silver platter. And it looks like that's exactly what he did, cooperating with the authorities to avoid his own lengthy jail sentence.
All the major gambling prosecutions in the U.S., since Tzvetkoff's arrest have been run out of the office of Arlo Devlin-Brown, the Manhattan Asst. U.S. Attorney, who is Tzvetkoff's "handler."
According to a source, "He knows how to reverse-engineer transactions to determine its original source," making him very valuable to investigators.
And the biggest irony of all? It's been rumored that the only reason the FBI got their hands on him is because Full Tilt or Poker Stars (the companies he used to work for and stole from) tipped off the FBI that he was going to be traveling to the United States
They ratted him out ... and he turned the tables. No honor among thieves.
And as the Courier Mail put it, if this were still the old days, he'd buried in the Las Vegas desert right now.
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