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Do You know who Daniel Tzvetkoff is? Full Tilt, Poker Stars, Absolute Poker Do

I forced myself to stay away from online poker’s #BlackFriday for the most part in an effort not to get caught up in the haze of what’s going on with the take down of the three big online poker sites – Full Tilt, Poker Stars, Absolute Poker.  In an effort to get to know more about the situation it’s important to know how and why the take down happened.  To get started let’s look at the person behind the take down, Daniel Tzvetkoff from Business Insider.

He (Daniel Tzvetkoff) made Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars millions of dollars — and made as much as $150,000 a day for himself — but then got even more greedy and started taking their. They sued him, accusing Tzvetkoff of taking more than $100 million of their money.

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 cash, he was considered a flight risk and denied bail.

Then after a “secret” meeting with prosecutors last August, he was suddenly out on bail. And now his former colleagues are the ones facing serious prison time.

Daniel Tzvetkoff knows the operations of these poker sites inside and out. It was knowledge of the financial industry that allowed them to operate. He’s the one man positioned to give the U.S. Attorneys everything they needed to take down their businesses.

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, Tzvetkoff “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 last year.

That’s a really good capture of how these companies went down.  On top of this there are lots of conspiracy theories throughout the poker message boards.  Like with most conspiracy theories, some kind of make sense and some are outlandish.  I’ll do a little more digging to see what other information I can find.

This story has captured mainstream, casino and gambling media alike.  There’s too much information available, so I’ll narrow down what I think is reliable, useful or interesting. I’m retweeting a lot of information from people I think are reliable, so if you’re interested in more info follow me or check the stream.  Also, if you follow me say hi.

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