Have you ever seen the tv show Drug Wars, where the drug dealers arrested by the DEA agents are systematically offered to walk free if they can “flip” their suppliers?
This is iGaming Wars. And “flipping” the former customers and/or business partners is not an exception.
A month ago we reported about Australian online payments tycoon Daniel Tzvetkoff, who was bailed out from jail possibly after agreeing to collaborate with US prosecutors. Now another online gambling payments expert, Douglas Rennick, has received what most industry commentators have defined a very light sentence, six months house arrest. And the question is: did he give something in exchange?
Rennick after pleading guilty to processing illegal gambling payments for hundreds of millions dollars was facing tens of years in prison, so a sentence of six months in home detention, with the most serious charges of money laundering and bank fraud replaced by a minor charge, suggest that a deal with US federal authorities must have been agreed.
Just like US prosecutors were initially adamant that Tzvetkoff remained in jail and now there are no public records of a bail hearing for him, on Rennick pages and pages had been written with comments on the long sentence that awaited him. What was not reported was about a number of documents Rennick initially refused to turn over to the US Government because he was worried they would further implicate him. Documents the US prosecutors wanted at all costs as they believed they would have helped in their ongoing investigation into offshore online gambling operations.
Meanwhile news of a former online payment operator being sent back to jail told the story of yet another money launderer turned informant.
While the initial case never made the news on gambling sites, when Michael Olaf Schutt was put back in jail after his wife asked to be removed from his bond, it was revealed how (once again) someone who had been charged with money laundering, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge after helping federal prosecutors investigate a multi-million money laundering operation related to online poker.
Back in September, the Toronto Sun run a feature article listing all PokerStars connections in Canada, going from the site’s founders to the company that developed the software for the world’s largest online poker site. But they forgot about payment provider Douglas Rennick, who is from British Columbia.
PokerStars used the services of both Rennick and Tzvetkoff and even though the poker site continues to claim its activities in the United States are legal, its owners and top managers in the iGaming Wars are like the “Colombians” in the Drug Wars. Did Rennick and Tzvetkoff “flip” their suppliers?
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