22 July 2007
posted on www.OnlinePoker-News.com

Three men found guilty of inciting terrorism were also found guilty last week of fraud and money laundering through online poker sites. According to a report in the Washington Times, investigators in the U.S. and Britain spent hundreds of hours tracking the three though the internet, touching on thousands of merchants in many countries.

The men used more than 130 credit cards at 43 different online gambling websites. These allegations highlight the need for all online casinos to take stringent anti-money laundering policies in order to minimize the exposure to such risk. Although online casino are not subject to the regulatory pressure that banks and other financial institutions are, but they can still be subject to civil suit if they fail to show that they have taken every step to minimize the company's risk to money laundering activities.


This is one of the first instances known where money laundering through online poker rooms has been documented.

The global jihad landed in Linda Spence's e-mail inbox during the summer of 2003, in the form of a message urging her to verify her eBay account information, according to a report in the Washington Post. The 35-year-old New Jersey resident clicked on the link included in the message, which took her to a counterfeit eBay site where she entered personal financial information.

Spence's information wound up in the hands of a man in Britain who investigators say was the brains behind a cell that sought to facilitate bombings in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

Investigators say Spence's stolen data made its way via the Internet black market for stolen identities to a 21-year-old biochemistry student, Tariq al-Daour, one of three British residents who pleaded guilty this week to using the Internet to incite murder.

According to the Washington Post, Investigators in the United States and Britain say the three used computer viruses and stolen credit card accounts to set up a network of communication forums and Web sites that hosted such things as tutorials on computer hacking and bomb-making, and videos of beheadings and suicide bombings in Iraq.

Authorities say one of the men, Waseem Mughal, a 24-year-old law student, was found with a computer containing a 26-minute video that included instructions in Arabic for preparing a suicide-bomb vest and a recipe for improvised explosives.