Less than two weeks after the Blue Monday indictments that seized eleven bank accounts and ten domain names, $470,407 of “asset sharing” funds has been given to the county police service.
According to an ICE press release, the involvement of Anne Arundel County Police in the operation – imaginatively dubbed “Operation Texas Hold 'em” by ICE – was of “critical assistance” to Homeland Security.
The operation involved setting up a fake payment processor Linwood Payment Solutions. Operating for over a year, the dummy processor allegedly handled over 300,000 transactions totalling more than $33m for businesses betED, BMW Entertainment, DoylesRoom and TruePoker.
Given the naming choice of the operation by ICE, it is perhaps notable that the original “Blue Monday indictments” specified that all sites were involved in specifically “online sports betting”, not online poker, despite sites such as DoylesRoom and True Poker domain names being seized. Neither operation has an online sportsbook.
William Winter, special agent in charge of the Baltimore HSI investigation, stated that the $500k did not come directly from the recent seizures.
“The money that was shared back today is from seizures that happened more than a year ago,” he said, according to an article in the Baltimore Sun.
The money will be used “[to buy] vehicles, weapons [...] and to do training that is much needed for these officers to do their job,” he noted.
Other potential beneficiaries of the “HSI Asset Forfeiture/Equitable Sharing program” include the Internal Revenue Service and the Maryland State Police, both of whom assisted in the investigation.
