People used to play poker, and cheat, and the whole thing was illegal.
Now, people play poker, and cheat, and they want the government to police their poker games and make sure they're fair.
Complete waste of resources.
I think arresting people for cheating legitimizes backroom / mafia gambling. All the other rings (and those left from this one) can say "Look, those other guys got arrested. The law protects you. We don't want that to happen to us. Our game is definitely fair." Of course, they too are cheating.
The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull. If you or I get cheated, the FBI won't care about that.
Operating a business that defrauds people is the domain of government enforcement.
I think you’re trying to reduce this to some sort of small scale friendly poker game between friends. It was not. It was an organized crime business operation that was systematically committing fraud.
Fraud is illegal and within scope of government enforcement.
The state / society needs to enforce a basic level of trust for Business A to buy widgets from Business B, and for Customer C to be employed, etc.
Betting on sports / poker / etc. is not part of that. Nobody is creating anything of value when you spin the roulette wheel. At best, the house wins and most players lose... and that is a harm to society. At worst, the house cheats or some subset of players cheat, and most players lose... and that too is a harm to society.
Gambling does not deserve the legitimacy of being policed.
Disagree, this case demonstrates the exact opposite -- you think your private game is legit because there's celebrities playing? Think again, it's a far more sophisticated scam operation than you could imagine.
> The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull.
Again, I doubt it. Likely it's because the mafia is involved, and according to the indictment "the defendants and their co-conspirators used threats of force and violence to secure the repayment of debts from illegal poker games."
If you run a Jimmy John’s, most of your customers will pay with credit cards. Everything runs through banks. You can’t launder that easily. It’s all traceable. It’s all taxable.
Run a poker operation and you can get your marks to give you crypto, cash, or small transfers.
$7 million in pure cash and crypto proceeds from a poker game is a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from a sandwich shop for an organized crime operation.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/wells-farg...
No, if you personally run a poker game in your house and cheat your friends the government doesn’t care. The FBI isn’t going to be interested.
If you join the mafia and run an organized crime ring that operates poker games as a business which systematically defrauds people for large amounts of money and funnels the proceeds to organized crime through money laundering operations, the FBI will be interested.
If you look at this story and only see “some people cheated at a poker game” you’re missing the real story. This was a full on organized crime business operation
edit: now I think of it: if the cloth is thin enough you don't even need near-IR. Old fashioned IR camera's (those without any fancy filter) from the '00 showed though some relatively thin opaque synthetic material with a tiny IR source so ...
Terahertz radiation is used in airports with (arguable) safety and efficacy. the resolution is sufficient to read protest statements written under a passengers shirt in metallic ink. I wonder if it could read cards should they be specially crafted similarly.
Sounds like FBI invented this very stupid/confusing name for the story when they could have used much something much better and clearer. X-ray really has nothing to do with this.
Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
Besides the fact they were often targeting pros - this was reported on and known by LA area pros for at least two years now. why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me. I can’t stress enough that in the pro scene this was common knowledge. years old podcast clips are coming up talking about it.
Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.
It's about time we legalize physical and online casinos.
Hopefully that communist who is about to be elected in NYC won't stop the new 5 billion Citi FIeld Casino. It should have been a 12bn dollar Wynn casino in Hudson Yards but anyways...a smaller one is better than none at all.
Poker (and chess for money) and also golf for money will also become the only game in town for us to do and not go completely crazy if AGI does indeed takes off and makes us live without having to work until 120
Would love to know more about such a machine, if anyone has any insight. Are these developed underground? How expensive could they be?
If it can efficiently take in a deck of cards and deterministically return a rigged deck in a reasonable amount of time, I would be fascinated at how they solved that problem.
Also, they spelled "Bonnano" wrong in that article. It is Bonanno.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonanno_crime_family
Bon Anno = Good Year
It sounds like each of them could get at most a six-figure payday out of this. Which is no chump change, to be sure, but it sounds like many of them could have made as much money without the risk of going to jail just by getting a desk job.
Plus, there's no way a conspiracy that big is going to remain secret for long.
Maybe the expected to get away with it for longer and get a bigger payoff. But wow, it seems like a ton of effort.
Mistletoe•45m ago
prodigycorp•41m ago
Everything Silver did grew revenue fourfold. By every metric, he’s a good commissioner. And yet I don’t know a single person in real life who actually likes the NBA. People I talk to find the NBA anywhere from inaccessible to an outright turnoff, due to load management (and player pay), tanking, a glacial pace of play, and so on. That’s why the only way I can consume and engage the game is by listening to podcasts about it. Podcasts that now belch gambling ads at me constantly.
deelowe•34m ago
sojournerc•17m ago
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LUPh7waoWtydoiwjEgP16?si=-...
tclancy•11m ago