As of April 15, 2011, when you go to pokerstars.com, this is what you will see.

It’s a lot like what happened to the pirate websites recently where the Department of Justice took over the domain name and put their own message up on their servers.

The FBI has indicted 11 defendants who are the founders or owners of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, and seized over 70 bank accounts.

Pokerstars has moved their website to pokerstars.eu and for non-US players, it’s business as usual. However, US players are not allowed to play although their website states that all your deposited money is safe.

At this point, I have to believe that most players would be scared to deposit any new money and there is probably a rush to withdraw money from the sites. This obviously has to hurt the bottom line for those big poker sites.

What will this all mean for online poker? For now, it’s wait and see but it’s not good for business, except perhaps at live casinos.

3 Responsesto:
“DOJ shuts down online poker sites”

Cochinoman » Blog Archive » WSOP 2011 Re-Boot on July 3rd, 2011 at 9:05 pm:

[...] the online poker armageddon in April this year, it appear that there is a downward dent in the number of participants at the World [...]

Cochinoman » Blog Archive » WSOP 2011: My POV on August 9th, 2011 at 3:52 am:

[...] usual, my predictions were completely wrong. The online armageddon did not cause the numbers to free fall. In fact, the numbers were slightly up, and as you can see [...]

LA Poker.info » Blog Archive » Full Tilt Ponze on September 25th, 2011 at 8:43 pm:

[...] is yet another bad blow to on-line poker, after the bad beat it got back in April from the DOJ. Back in June, there was a lot of talk about Full Tilt when professional poker player Phil Ivey [...]

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