Just when we thought the case turned cold, more info comes up!

Unfortunately, I’m a bit late to this informing you guys.  I just got back home from participating in a clinical study for childhood cancer survivors at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN…but here we go, some interesting stuff below!

On to the news, 2+2′er “BigOlTatties” broke this news and PM’d me the details.  Turns out he found something very interesting on forfeiture.gov.  Here’s the screen shot from forfeiture.gov, since they tend to remove these listings fairly quickly:

This shows the forfeiture notice of funds seized in the amount of $1,820,008.93 from a Deutsche Bank account held in the name of ABN AMRO Bank NV.  You might recall that I was the first to draw the link to “uncleared” funds being snagged by the United States Secret Service in this post and follow up with more detail here of my suspicions.

Also, here’s a screen shot from justia.com showing the court case, office, case number, etc:

BigOlTatties was able to confirm these details for me through the link to the forfeiture.gov page and then further help by 2+2′er Diamond_Flush uploading/posting these government case documents on google docs:

US vs 1.8mil seized from DBT Case 2:11-cv- This document contains information about the complaint, the nature and basis for the seizure as well as some facts supporting their action (violations of laws, jurisdiction, naming the bank account as the defendent).

Exhibit A, Declaration by Agent Grant Wagner – This document is a bit more interesting.  It details how the agents of the United States Secret Service Southwest Florida Financial Crimes Strike Force (USSSSWFFCSF …for short… lol no, I’m not making that up) went about their investigation.  In this document it talks about some cardrunners pros receiving some big amounts from Quicktender.  It appears as part of their case, the secret service sorted the data by who received the various wires between from chargestream and then summed up the amounts to see who got some of the biggest cumulative withdrawals and then went to work on identifying who is who to build their case.  It just so happened that 2 of the 3 players they cited in this document were cardrunners pros (sick brag?).  They did not give any names but they did use sources such as linkedin.com to identify and confirm that these players in question were professional poker players and receiving funds from Chargestream, aka UMW/QT.  According to the document there were 13,077 transactions in and out of the Chargestream accounts totaling just under $53 million (about $23.7 mil incoming and $29.2 mil outgoing) .

The agents also googled to find various sources on online gambling web forums talking about ways to process payments in and out of some of the various poker and gambling sites.  Quicktender came up and there were also reportedly open online gambling investigations by the USSSSWFFCSF looking into BayDonHill PLC, a name that I hadn’t heard of until this document, which was linked in a forum post by a user saying that withdraws from Quicktender.com might show up under that name or Chargestream.  This also potentially confirms other suspicions I had about the nature of John Briggs and Paul Templeman’s businesses.  They developed the abstraction of “UseMyWallet” and the implementation of “Quicktender” for the specific reason of planning head in case they get nailed by the feds eventually. As I mentioned in that post, this is not their first rodeo.

The document also went on to say that they did conduct interviews with local online poker players.  I’m guessing this is to make the case appear to be somewhat relevant to them geographically (they have a section noting the Venue in the Middle District of Florida where they are based).  According to the document, about $145k of the $23.7 million was received by users in their area.

This is just speculation, but when I read about the agents going to houses and interviewing people, I did remember a posting in the Poker Legislation forum on 2+2 that described a visit by the Secret Service.  It’s unclear if this poster is one of the people interviewed as part of this investigation, but certainly it’s not one of the interviews that were named by date as this post was made in February and the document mentions interviews in April.  It was either part of this investigation or the Secret Service has some other ongoing efforts.

Another interesting tidbit, to relate this case back to some previous ones, the Exhibit A document says the following: “In February 2010, the USSS arrested a subject in the Middle District of Florida for operating an unlicensed money transmitting business…”  That, my friends, would be Michael Olaf Schuett who according to the linked article was mailing 150 parcels a week through FedEx and where they opened many of the parcels to find checks and reported it to the government.  Other suspicions came from bank employees where he was wiring in and out millions.  As stated by the Exhibit A document, after learning about how much bank wiring was going on, the USSS started a Federal Investigation which eventually lead to this case.

I’d like to keep digging into some of this stuff but for now it’s bed time.  Hopefully more up this weekend!