Ira Rubin, one of the 11 men indicted by the United States Department of Justice on Black Friday, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy charges in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Sentencing has been set for May 17th.
Rubin admitted to working with online poker rooms PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker as a payment processor. He said he made sure cashouts from the online poker rooms were “disguised as payments from nonexistent online merchants,” so that U.S. banks would not be able to detect their true origins and therefore not be able to block the transactions. This activity went on from 2006 through March 2011, the month prior to the Black Friday indictments.
In June 2011, the 53-year old Rubin had requested $300,000 bond and to be permitted to live with his parents in Florida, but Judge James Colt denied Rubin bail, citing “unlimited reasons,” including flight risk. Assistant U.S. Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown said that Rubin chartered a plane from Costa Rica to Guatemala on April 15th, the very day of the indictments, with Thailand as the eventual destination. Rubin was arrested upon arrival in Guatemala. His attorney denied any nefarious scheme, claiming that the trip to Guatemala had been planned before Black Friday, but Devlin-Brown also cited a conversation Rubin had with a fellow inmate in which he said he wanted to acquire a fake passport once in Guatemala.
Rubin was charged with nine counts in the Black Friday indictment: three counts of violation of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), conspiracy to violate the UIGEA, conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and three counts of operation of an illegal gambling business. According to an Associated Press article, he faces up to 80 years in prison if convicted of each charge, but his plea agreement with the prosecution stipulates that the recommended sentence be between 18 and 24 months. Because Rubin has been in jail since his arrest, he is not likely to serve much more time, at least relative to what he could have served.
Ira Rubin’s problems with the law date back to before Black Friday. In 2006, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against his company, Global Marketing Group, for committing telemarketing fraud by assisting at least nine Canadian telemarketing firms in selling fake unsecured credit cards to customers. The victims were required to pay an advance fee for the cards, but these cards often never appeared in their mailboxes. In December of that year, a temporary restraining order was issued and the following month, a preliminary injunction prohibited Rubin from engaging in telemarketing and payment processing. Rubin violated both the restraining order and injunction and in January 2008, a judge ordered him to appear in court to show cause as to why he should not be held in contempt for the violation. He did not show, an arrest warrant was issued, and Rubin fled the country.
Ira Rubin’s guilty plea comes a month after Absolute Poker co-founder Brent Beckley pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud.
