Fraudulent online gambler sent to jail

[jetset]

ONLINE GAMBLING IDENTITY THIEF CONVICTED

London man scored almost GBP 80,000 using fraudulent passports, identity cards and false utility bills

A London court fired a warning shot this week against online punters who employ false identities and documents in order to register at online casinos.

In what is believed to be one of the first prosecutions of its kind, Londoner Andrei Osipau (35) was convicted of stealing other people's identities and using fraudulent documents to open multiple online betting accounts in order to exploit bonus offers, This is Local London news reported Tuesday.

Prosecutors presented evidence that Osipau made nearly GBP 80,000 from online gambling after using fraudulent passports, identity cards and false utility bills to open various online accounts. He also used internet payment organisations to transfer the criminal proceeds from the online betting accounts to open bank accounts under false names.

Osipau was apprehended following a joint investigation by detectives from the Metropolitan Police Gambling Unit, Project Amberhill, and the UK Gambling Commission.

The accused was apparently not the sharpest knife in the drawer - his scam was identified on February 26 last year when an online betting company received two UK passports bearing different names but the same image within 12 minutes of each other.

The operator reported the incident to the Gambling Commission, which alerted the police and triggered an investigation. This eventually found that Osipau had masked his own IP address in order to disguise his identity and location.

When the police raided his home they discovered more than 5,900 scans of passports, identity cards, utility bills and bank statements relating to people from countries that included the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Osipau was sentenced to three years imprisonment at Southwark Crown Court on April 3 2012. He had pleaded guilty to five counts of fraud, eight counts on possession of articles for use in fraud and one count of transferring criminal property at an earlier hearing.

The head of the Met's Gaming Unit, Detective Inspector Ann-Marie Waller said: "This joint investigation with the Gambling Commission demonstrates the Met's commitment to combating high tech organised crime. The sentence imposed by the judge today should deter anyone considering committing crime involving stolen or compromised identities."

 

[vinylweatherman]

This is how it SHOULD be done, found guilty and punished by due legal process, not some arbitrary decision of an operator that acts as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner with limited and obscure rights to appeal, and no chance for the accused to defend themselves against the evidence.

The £80K should also be confiscated under the proceeds of crime act, as if this man gets out in 18 months for good behaviour and then gets access to the 80K, where's the deterrent? This was the whole point of the act. It appreciates that many criminals are happy to serve a few years if it means they get to keep what they managed to gain from their actions, and would simply carry on where they left off.

This is NOT "bonus abuse" or civil contract violations. This is theft of personal documents and misuse of others identities. Those who's identities are stolen can find they suffer problems online and would have absolutely no idea why. My worry is that when operators work outside the law, they could just as easily finger the VICTIM of identity theft as the perpetrator purely because the thief used the identity first, and managed to be seen as the genuine party.

With this court case, operators now know that those identities found in the search may have been used for this scam, and that should they crop up a second time, it is likely due to the genuine owners deciding to play, rather than them being the fraudulent users of an identity already used.

Given the wide range of identities used, this man is probably part of something larger. It is more than the amateur use of friends details to operate a multi-account "syndicate".

 

[conker]

For 80 grand is it really worth it? I know it is a lot of money, but 3 years in a prison and all that investigation into your life must be hard to take.

 

[footdr]

Glad to hear he was sent to jail for fraudulent issues rather than for just depositing and playing at online casinos.

 

[vinylweatherman]

For 80 grand is it really worth it? I know it is a lot of money, but 3 years in a prison and all that investigation into your life must be hard to take.

For many it IS worth it. Remember, it stopped at 80 grand because he got caught. He was gambling with his freedom, and had he not made that silly error that raised suspicions, he could have carried on making even more. Everything else he was doing clearly fooled the system.

If you are jobless, 80K is one HELL of an amount of money for what could be considered 18 months (for good behaviour) "work". Many people work in unpleasant jobs for the minimum wage, so to them prison life might seem like a 3 year holiday, and if 80K was on offer at the end of it, all the better.

Someone with a nice job, and earning over 80K a year would NOT want to risk their liberty for such small gains.

A large portion of fraud using false identities is aimed at the benefits system, and 80K is considered quite a yield here, and is much harder work that sitting at a PC registering several accounts at casinos. This man would also be pretty well "tooled up" to target the benefits system, so he may have been doing so, but has not been caught. It is possible that what was found in the search will uncover further frauds.