Fourteen months behind bars for head of Absolute Poker
- by Josef Rantamaki
The US District Court in Manhattan has given a 14-month jail sentence to 32-year-old Brent Beckley, co-founder of Absolute Poker.
He had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud. However, due to his agreeing to co-operate with the authorities and because no one had lost money through his fraudulent actions, his sentence is relatively light.
However, Lewis Kaplan, the US District judge, said Beckley deserved a prison sentence. “The sentence has to make clear that the government of the United States means business in these types of cases,” he explained.
Beckley, who had earlier said, “I fooled myself into thinking that what I was doing was OK,” had plea-bargained for a prison sentence of between 12 to 18 months, a forfeit of $300,000 and a fine of $30,000.
The judge agreed to these guidelines. However, his acceptance still leaves players and customers of Absolute Poker with empty pockets, as they are still owed about $60 million.
His sentence follows on the heels of other high profile court cases. John Campos, a 59 year old Utah banker, recently went to jail for three months for processing online poker transactions amounting to $200 million, some of which was for Full Tilt Poker.
This was followed by the arrest of Ray Bitar, CEO of Full Tilt Poker, at the beginning of July, whose company still owes $350 million to players around the world.
Brent Beckley, John Campos and Ray Bitar are not the only ones caught in the net of Black Friday. Also waiting to hear sentences are Bradley Franzen, Ryan Lang, Ira Rubin and Chad Elie. Several others have yet to be caught and are being hunted down including Absolute Poker’s Scott Tom alongside PokerStar’s Isai Scheinberg, Nelson Burtnick and Paul Tate.