Quote:
Originally Posted by YouAreAwesome
Awesome. So the next question, does anyone know of any sites who openly allow VPN ISPs?
I know of friends who played on Party and Ipoker from the US with no issue for years. The only site that is actively going after VPNers is Stars as far as I know (as in actively trying to find them) but my info could be outdated. Some people get away with it on Stars but I think they're using teamviewer setups to display a legitimate IP. You'd still need to 'establish' a residence overseas though and then get a dedicated VPN for that country/area.
@Mangoball email Stars support and ask. They may be useless but they'd be able to give a better answer than us. I'm not sure if the 11th is a firm date yet and if so what time etc or if it's an estimate
To be safe I wouldn't play any multi day event that carries over to the 11th either our time or US time and plan to have your last significant buyin events finish on the 10th Australian time but Stars will be able to give a better answer than me on that.
@Aveemaria Basically, yeah, exactly. The sites that got shut down in the US had their American assets seized, or at least FTP and Stars did. They were doing stuff like trying to buy a bank to make their payment processing easier and as the FTP owners at least lived in the US their assets were there. UB basically had no money anyway as they had stolen most of it (and it turned out FTP was in a similar situation, although FTP probably never collapses without BF whereas UB was going to anyway at some stage). None of the sites offering poker in the US currently (ACR, Ignition etc) have US assets and none of the sites that'll be offering to Australian (the same two + chinese and bitcoin sites) have Australian assets either.
The reason PAP was shut down is that it was a registered Australian company with an Australian owner (Luke), Australian assets (Luke's company being incorporated here, PAP having Australian staff etc) and PAP openly paying Australian taxes etc. as (it's my understanding anyway) their lawyers had told them to do.
Basically, PAP tried to just do what Stars and co had been doing for years only do so openly from Australia as an Australian business and pay taxes on their earnings etc. and obviously that turned out to be poor legal advice that the company was operating on. I'm fairly sure that if Luke had just wrapped PAP up in shell corporations within shell corporations so ownership was unclear, incorporated it offshore or lived/taken his assets offshore and hired non-Australian staff and so on that the site would not have been shut down and there would have been nothing the government could do about that and it would still be operating today. The ridiculous this is because PAP created Australian jobs/had assets here/paid taxes here, the government was able to shut it down, which it never attempted with the offshore sites until the new legislation closed the 'grey areas'.
Theoretically speaking if Luke moved to Antigua or whatever and brought all of his assets with him out of reach of the government the site could open up again tomorrow and there would be nothing the govt could do to stop it beyond arresting Luke if he ever returned to Australia.
Obviously none of that's going to happen but hypothetically if anyone moved to a Caribbean tax haven where they had citizenship/permanent residency they could simply develop software, host the site on offshore servers and hold site funds in an offshore bank account, run ads through fb/google/etc and start a new site catering to the Australian market and there would be nothing that the government could do beyond sending them sternly worded letters and threatening to arrest the site owners if they ever went to Australia.
That's basically what the govenment will do re: ACR and Ignition, but if Calvin Ayre (I assume he owns Ignition but idk someone correct me if wrong) doesn't come to Australia or move his money here there is absolutely nothing the government can do to enforce the ban beyond asking ISPs to block the site, which could be bypassed through VPN use anyway on any site that is determined to serve the Australian market.
Isai Scheinberg is still technically wanted in the US (or was last I could recall) but if he doesn't go there or move his money there there's nothing they can do about it and morally speaking he hasn't done anything wrong so why should he take a plea deal or whatever, simply tell the DOJ to **** off and never go to America or move money through there, problem solved.
Hell, if I had no ties to Australia and didn't mind being labelled a criminal in my home country it would be pretty tempting to just move to a tax haven, establish residency/citizenship and just open a new site targeting the Australian/American markets. But I don't really want to be an international fugitive and all that, so someone else will have to do that instead.
Obviously sites that offer online poker to Australians/Americans aren't doing anything morally wrong as long as they run the site with integrity, run a fair game and pay out players when they win etc.
In any case hopefully we end up getting the committee recommendations through assuming they're favourable which they are overwhelmingly likely to be and the major sites leaving the market ends up being temporary. We still have a real chance of that, people crying online poker is dead in Australia are wrong, the long term fight is not over.
Last edited by SwoopAE; 08-24-2017 at 09:29 AM.