World Cup Gambling Hub Lands Ambassador in Vegas Court
(Bloomberg, 5 Aug 2014) – When FBI agents went into Villa 8882 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on the afternoon of July 9, they found Wei Seng Phua and his son watching the World Cup semifinal between the Netherlands and Argentina.
Phua, a regular at the Poker King Club in Macau where seven-figure pots are common, had flown in from the former Portuguese colony on his private jet two weeks earlier. He travels on a diplomatic passport from San Marino, hobnobs with the world’s top professional poker players, and according to the FBI, he’s a high-ranking member of a Hong Kong-based triad.
When the FBI entered their villa, the father and son and a third man had their laptops switched on to betting websites showing the live odds for the game and instant messaging windows. In two of the hotel’s adjacent villas, which rent for a minimum of $25,000 a night, investigators discovered other members of Phua’s group amid clusters of computers and monitors and three large-screen televisions showing soccer games.
During the Federal Bureau of Investigation raid, a woman working on a laptop was ordered to put her hands up. She raised one hand and continued typing on a betting website with the other, according to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S.
Phua, 50, a Malaysian citizen who also goes by Paul Phua, and his son appeared today in federal court in Las Vegas and pleaded not guilty to charges they ran an illegal gambling business out of the Caesars Palace villas. Phua and his associates, six of whom are set to be arraigned Aug. 7, were using the SBOBet and IBCBet sports betting websites, neither of which is licensed to operate in Nevada, to monitor odds and place bets, according to federal prosecutors.
Sport Betting
Those are the two biggest online sport betting commission businesses in the world, according to Chris Eaton, former head of security at soccer’s governing body FIFA. Eaton, now a director at Doha, Qatar-based International Centre for Sport Security, estimated that each company turns over about $2 billion a week.
Of more than 8,000 operators offering sports betting worldwide, most do so without obtaining authorizations required in the countries where their clients are located, making about 80 percent of all sports bets illegal, according to a May 2014 report by the Sorbonne University and International Centre for Sport Security.
David Chesnoff, Phua’s lawyer, after today’s hearing that “an indictment is just an allegation and we adamantly maintain our innocence.”
Poker Players
Phua and his son, Darren, are out on bail after two professional poker players posted $2.5 million in cash bonds and Phua’s $48-million Gulfstream G550 was secured as collateral. The poker players, Andrew Robl and Phil Ivey, who has won 10 World Series of Poker bracelets, are friends of Phua, Chesnoff said last week.
Phua’s lawyer described him as an “entrepreneur.” The Justice Department said in a court filing that he’s a high-ranking member of an Asian organized-crime group, the 14K Triad. Triads are involved in the illegal drug trade, money laundering, illegal gambling and extortion rackets.
Chesnoff denied the allegation, saying he wasn’t going “to dignify it with a response,” and said his client was a “complete gentleman.”
Phua at one point provided so-called junket services to the Macau subsidiary of Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS) He was the owner of Sat Ieng, a licensed operator that brought high rollers to the casino’s VIP rooms in exchange for a share of the turnover, according to a 2006 filing by Teem Foundation Group Ltd., a Hong Kong company that invested in Phua’s business.
When he was arrested last month, Phua told federal agents he was betting on the World Cup through someone in the Philippines named “Foo.” He also told them he has invested $200 million in the IBC website and that he had bet “between $200 million and $300 million in Hong Kong money” since arriving at Villa 8882 on June 23, according to the complaint. In a separate interview, Darren Phua said his father owns IBC.
