BetonSports plc was a British

online gambling Online gambling is any kind of gambling conducted on the internet. This includes virtual poker, casinos and sports betting. The first online gambling venue opened to the general public was ticketing for the Liechtenstein International Lottery in ...

company founded by

Gary Kaplan Gary Kaplan (born January 5, 1959 in New York) is the founder of BetonSports.com (BoS), an online sports betting company which took in wagers amounting to nearly $4 billion from 2002 and 2004, 98 percent of which came from the United States. In 20 ...

in 1995. It stopped operating in 2006 after the arrest of its CEO,

David Carruthers David Carruthers (born September 1957 in Edinburgh, Scotland) is a British businessman who was the CEO of online gambling company BETonSPORTS plc from July 2000 until July 2006. He was arrested in the United States on 16 July 2006 on charges ...

. The company was one of the biggest players in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

online gaming market, drawing in several billion

US dollars The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from Dollar, other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American ...

in wagers in the early 2000s."U.S. permanently bans BetOnSports"
ZDNews, 10 November 2006 In June 2006 US authorities

indicted An indictment ( ) is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offence is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use the felonies concept often use that of an ...

the company and a number of its executives on

RICO The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. RICO was en ...

mail fraud Mail fraud and wire fraud are terms used in the United States to describe the use of a physical or electronic mail system to defraud another, and are federal crimes there. Jurisdiction is claimed by the federal government if the illegal activit ...

, and

tax evasion Tax evasion is an illegal attempt to defeat the imposition of taxes by individuals, corporations, trusts, and others. Tax evasion often entails the deliberate misrepresentation of the taxpayer's affairs to the tax authorities to reduce the taxp ...

charges arising from its supplying online betting to customers in the United States (the alleged crimes took place before the adoption of the

Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) is United States legislation regulating online gambling. It was added as Title VIII to the SAFE Port Act (found at ) which otherwise regulated port security. The UIGEA prohibits gam ...

). In July 2004"BetOnSports PLC Shareholders May Sue the Company"
/ref> the company was floated on the

Alternative Investment Market AIM (formerly the Alternative Investment Market) is a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange that was launched on 19 June 1995 as a replacement to the previous Unlisted Securities Market (USM) that had been in operation since 1980. It allows ...

of the

London Stock Exchange London Stock Exchange (LSE) is a stock exchange in the City of London, England, United Kingdom. , the total market value of all companies trading on LSE was £3.9 trillion. Its current premises are situated in Paternoster Square close to St Pau ...

with the

ticker symbol A ticker symbol or stock symbol is an abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market. In short, ticker symbols are arrangements of symbols or characters (generally Latin letters ...

BSS.LN."Quote for BETonSPORTS PLC (BSS.LN)"
''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' online share price service, URL retrieved 31 March 2007 Although listed in London, the majority of its operations were in several

Caribbean The Caribbean (, ) ( es, El Caribe; french: la Caraïbe; ht, Karayib; nl, De Caraïben) is a region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some bordering both the Caribbean Se ...

locations (principally

Aruba Aruba ( , , ), officially the Country of Aruba ( nl, Land Aruba; pap, Pais Aruba) is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands physically located in the mid-south of the Caribbean Sea, about north of the Venezuela peninsula of ...

Antigua Antigua ( ), also known as Waladli or Wadadli by the native population, is an island in the Lesser Antilles. It is one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region and the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua and Bar ...

, and later

Costa Rica Costa Rica (, ; ; literally "Rich Coast"), officially the Republic of Costa Rica ( es, República de Costa Rica), is a country in the Central American region of North America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the no ...

"Significant cases: BETONSPORTS PLC"

United States Attorney United States attorneys are officials of the U.S. Department of Justice who serve as the chief federal law enforcement officers in each of the 94 U.S. federal judicial districts. Each U.S. attorney serves as the United States' chief federal c ...

's Office of the Eastern District of Missouri's page on its ongoing civil and criminal prosecution of BetonSports and related parties.) and almost all of its customers were within the United States. In July 2006 the

United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri (in case citations, E.D. Mo.) is a trial level federal district court based in St. Louis, Missouri, with jurisdiction over fifty counties in the eastern half of Missouri. Th ...

issued a sealed indictment of the company and a number of people related to its operations. The indictment was unsealed later that month when CEO

was arrested in

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

while returning to Costa Rica after attending the company's annual general meeting in London. Shortly after Carruthers' arrest trading in the company's stock was suspended."Gaming shares hit by US charges"

BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadca ...

18 July 2007 At that time BetonSports employed around 2,000 workers in Costa Rica. The company later terminated Carruthers and agreed to discontinue its US business."Founder of Betonsports arrested"

In March 2007 founder

was arrested in the

Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic ( ; es, República Dominicana, ) is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares wit ...

and was extradited to the US. In August 2009 Kaplan pleaded guilty to three charges, including a racketeering charge."BetOnSports Founder Pleads Guilty to Racketeering"
/ref> On 8 January 2010 it was announced that David Carruthers had been sentenced to 33 months in prison.
/ref>

References

{{Reflist

External links

* BETonSPORTS.com, the company's former online gambling portal. The site previously displayed information for customers whose funds were affected by the ongoing legal action. Companies formerly listed on the Alternative Investment Market Online gambling companies of the United Kingdom