Online poker sites shut down by FBI

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Jonathan Duhamel of Canada poses with prize money and bracelet after winning the World Series of Poker final in Las Vegas, November, 2010. Duhamel, 22, won $8.9m (£5.4m). Photograph: Steve Marcus/Reuters

For Mark Buchan, it was a bit of extra income to supplement his writing and teaching. Most people lose when they play poker online, but not this classics professor. On a good day, he says, he could make hundreds of dollars an hour from the comfort of his New York home.

But the FBI has ended his fun. A major crackdown on poker sites operating in the US has left British-born Buchan and many thousands of others with frozen gaming accounts.

Buchan noticed the action when he couldn't log on to his usual site. Popular sites – fulltiltpoker.com, pokerstars.com and absolutepoker.com – all have notices stating: "This domain name has been seized by the FBI." Buchan said: "Something had to happen at some point. But for them to do it like this was really, really surprising."

Gaming is, and always has been, a hot topic in the US. Sports betting online is illegal and last year David Carruthers, former chief executive of London's BetOnSports, was jailed for 33 months for "racketeering conspiracy".

Online poker seemed to inhabit a greyer area. Not any more. Preet Bharara, the US attorney for New York, has charged Raymond Bitar, Full Tilt's Ireland-based chief executive, and other online poker execs at rival sites, including Isle of Man-based PokerStars and Costa Rica's Absolute Poker, with bank fraud and money laundering. He followed it up with a civil suit seeking to recover $3bn (£1.8bn) in allegedly ill-gotten gains.

The defendants "concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme", said Bharara, "tricking" some US banks and "bribing" others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits. In their "zeal to circumvent the gambling laws", the defendants were flouting the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, brought in by George Bush, and had engaged in massive money laundering and bank fraud, he said. "Foreign firms that choose to operate in the United States are not free to flout the laws they don't like simply because they can't bear to be parted from their profits," added Bharara.

In a statement, Full Tilt said: "Mr Bitar and Full Tilt Poker believe online poker is legal – a position also taken by some of the best legal minds in the United States. Full Tilt Poker is, and has always been committed to preserving the integrity of the game and abiding by the law."

Angry poker players – who argue that their game is one of skill, not luck, so it is not gambling – took to the web to express themselves. The attorney general's Wikipedia entry was changed: "Bharara is a naturalized American citizen who spends what little free time he has bullying the homeless on the streets on NYC. Furthermore, he is wasting time and money chasing down poker sites to compensate for his small genitalia," it read.

But for Buchan the game is over, online at least. He said other sites would step in and offer poker online in the US, even if it is illegal, but he would not be playing them.

Poker and gambling experts say two forces are driving the crackdown: morality and a desire to collect tax dollars. "Sure people are worried about the effects of online gambling," said Michael Burke, the author of Never Enough: One Lawyer's True Story of How He Gambled His Career Away. Burke, a self-decribed gambling addict, who lectures on gaming addiction, said he had noticed a huge increase in the numbers of people who want to talk about problems with online gambling. "The real issue the government has is that they don't know how to tax it," Burke added.

He said studies had shown that social isolation and the constant availability of online poker was creating a new generation of potential problem gamblers, lured by stories of fortunes to be made. The "myth", he said, was reinforced by the $8.5m Joe "the kid" Cada won at the 2009 World Series Poker championship. "What about the thousands of others who lost money?" said Burke. "A very small percentage of gamblers becomes addicted but it's still a very large number of people," he said. "I believe if it's legalised there will be real problems."

Mark Griffiths, professor of gaming studies at of Nottingham Trent University, said online gambling has specific problems: the frequency of opportunity, anonymity and "disinhibition" that people experience online can lead to a loss of control but, he added, online games are unlikely to present problems for the majority.

"There are severe alcoholics out there and nobody is suggesting we return to prohibition," said Buchan, the classics professor, who condeded: "I was playing a little too much anyway." He is writing a guide to the classics and a book on death bed love scenes. "Now I can get on with some work," he said.

Zipcode lottery

From day one, American colonists were split on their attitudes to gambling. Puritans in Massachusetts Bay outlawed the possession of cards, dice and gaming tables – along with dancing and singing. Over in Jamestown, settlers were setting up lotteries and wishing they'd invented the scratchcard.

A patchwork of regulations has since sprung up to cover the country and its attitudes. New Orleans became a legal gambling Mecca in the 1800s, but locals were not above lynching card sharps. Las Vegas began its rise in the 1930s, New Jersey's Atlantic City legalised casino gambling in 1978, and some native Americans were allowed to open casinos on their land in the 1980s.

The new battleground is online gambling – a "scourge on our society" according to Republican congressman Bob Goodlatte. George Bush passed legislation aimed at hampering it in 2006 but many states would like toit legalizse itd so they can impose taxes punters and firms.

The last crackdown on online betting came in 2006 and led to the jailing of several gaming executives, including the UK's David Carruthers