When the Federal government, under the auspices of the Department of Justice and ICE, get it in their head that they are going to seize some website they don’t mess around. They are neither happy with taking down just one, as we saw when they seized almost 12 domains in one swoop recently; and it would seems that aren’t to worried about when they seize the wrongs ones.
They especially get all worked up when it comes to those disgusting and nasty poker sites out there that they have decided are illegal regardless of the fact that the sites in question don’t use servers based in the US and aren’t even registered US business. Their nasty and illegal and that is all there is to it so they have to go.
The problem is that if you are going to flex your seizing muscle it would be wise to make sure that the site you are seizing is the right one but someone seemed to have missed that memo when it came to the seizure of the Bodog.com domain. To be fair I guess it should be noted that Bodog.com was at one time a poker site but they moved the poker game part of the business away from that site years ago – long before the claims in the affidavit used to seize the site.
As for Bodog.com? It had become the face of the “Bodog Brand” and was used for licensing the Bodog name, but wasn’t itself a gambling site in ages. The affidavit for seizure (pdf and embedded below) claims that federal agents set up accounts and gambled on Bodog.com, but I really wonder if they didn’t miss the fact that they were redirected to another site. Checking the internet archive, it certainly looks like Bodog.com was pretty much out of commission long before the feds claimed to have set up and used accounts there. Either way, the seizure seems unlikely to do much to stop gambling on Bodog sites, considering that the actual gambling was happening on sites, other than Bodog.com, which likely are still perfectly operational.
via Techdirt
Way to go guys.
