“Not guilty, your honor.”
So said Bradley Franzen to U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas in a Manhattan court on Monday. Franzen, one of 11 people charged with bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling on April 15th, surrendered to FBI agents on Monday morning.
The 41-year-old Franzen, of Illinois and Costa Rica, was identified as a possible intermediary between online poker rooms and payment processors in an indictment released by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York this past Friday. According to the indictment, Franzen “worked with internet gambling companies… to identify poker processors willing to process payments for the poker companies, including through deceptive means.”
Franzen was charged with a total of nine counts, including conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to violate the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). He was released on $200,000 bond, which was secured by his parents’ house and their signatures.
In June 2009, Franzen and others allegedly created a fake business called Green2YourGreen, which purported to be a direct sales business in which customers could purchase environmentally friendly household products and resell them to others for a commission. The co-conspirators purportedly created a website to keep up the front, complete with products and a link to the Direct Selling Association Code of Ethics.
The Green2YourGreen website is still up and running today.
The 10 others charged in the “Black Friday” indictment include PokerStars founder Isai Scheinberg, Full Tilt Poker founder Ray Bitar, Absolute Poker co-founders Scott Tom and Brent Beckley.
On Tuesday, Chad Elie, a payment processor, pled not guilty in the case in a Manhattan courtroom. According to an Associated Press article, “At one point during Elie’s 10-minute court appearance, [Elie’s attorney William Cowden] handed a prosecutor a small box containing what he said was a 500 gigabyte hard drive. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas said he’d never before seen a defense lawyer hand over a piece of evidence at such an early stage of court proceedings.”
The U.S. Department of Justice seized the domain names of PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, AbsolutePoker.com, UltimateBet.com, and UB.com. Visitors to those sites will encounter an image that briefly explains the seizure. Both Full Tilt and PokerStars have stopped allowing U.S. customers to play on their sites, while UB and Absolute still allow U.S. players, but are not accepting new U.S. customers nor are they processing deposits or withdrawals.
The next largest U.S.-facing networks and poker rooms – Bodog, the Cake Poker Network, the Merge Gaming Network, the Everleaf Network, and the Yatahay Network – are still running games for players in the United States. One exception is Victory Poker, a member of the Cake Poker Network, which has asked Cake to block U.S.-based customers from playing on the site and has since transferred its U.S. clientele to Cake Poker.