Scamming all the way

A Las Vegas resident is facing accusations that he operated a Ponzi scheme, using the funds to feed his gambling addiction. Rodney Buckle was arrested recently by Las Vegas police on numerous fraud-related charges.

Instead of investing people’s money into the stock market like he said he would, the 65-year-old instead allegedly gambled away millions of dollars. A co-defendant in the case already pled guilty last year to theft, conspiracy, and securities fraud charges. Warisra Stevens was sentenced to at least 19 months of prison time. 

did not hold any relevant federal or state licenses

Buckle had operated his business under a variety of names and claimed to be a financial advisor and life coach. He did not hold any relevant federal or state licenses. One of his online ads stated: “Rodd University is a membership-based social club providing a platform for research and discussing topics ranging from current events to the stock market.”

Uncovering the scheme 

State investigators discovered that some people had contributed at little as $100 to the alleged Ponzi scheme, while others spent over $700,000. Buckle guaranteed significant returns from the investments. At one stage, he informed investors that he would require more funding in order to generate further returns. This led to some investors taking out new credit cards, refinancing their mortgages, and getting bank loans in return for so-called guaranteed returns. 

originally promised a 50% return on invested funds

The investigation into the scheme began following a complaint to Nevada state authorities from a couple who never received their supposedly guaranteed return on investment. Buckle had originally promised a 50% return on invested funds in 2015. The couple tried to get some of their investment back in 2017 in order to pay for bills, including those relating to a cancer diagnosis. They had contributed tens of thousands of dollars. 

The couple eventually discovered that Buckle had a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) judgment against him from back in 1999, resulting in him having to pay restitution of $3m to investors who had been misled. 

Funding a gambling addiction 

Buckle’s co-defendant in the case was his girlfriend. Speaking to investigators, she explained that Buckle would withdraw almost $25,000 weekly for gambling and personal use. Buckle funded his girlfriend’s lifestyle and she claimed that the entire business was just a Ponzi scheme. It was Stevens who revealed that Buckle is a gambling addict and could wager between $5,000 and $20,000 each day. 

Through further investigation, it was found that Buckle had placed sports bets totaling $2.4m at the Westgate Hotel and Casino sportsbook before he got banned, losing $76,000. He had also placed $440,000 worth of wagers at the South Point casino, resulting in $434,000 in losses. 

Authorities initially issued an arrest warrant for Buckle and his girlfriend in December 2019. It is not clear why it took so long for Buckle to be arrested and it appears that he actually self-surrendered. He is currently being held without bail, pending a January court date.

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BGaming, the in-house game developer for SOFTSWISS, periodically releases the state of the company and the state of the industry recaps. As we approach the new year, the company has released a new summary of its part in the online casino business. This timely recap highlights the company’s global growth this year along with calling attention to some of the innovative games it has offered to the greater market over the last 12 months.

The company is based in Eastern Europe so the catastrophic event in Ukraine stuck close to home. Industry leaders in and out of the area, including SoftSwiss, banded together to support the country in its time of trouble. With the Klitschko Foundation and the World Boxing Council, BGaming raised and delivered funds to Ukrainian citizens as they fought for their independence and freedom.

Business growth

As business goes, the company experienced historic growth over the last four quarters with gross gaming revenues (GGR) exploding by 217%. The volume of individual bets on their games also grew by a factor of 2.5x and the number of players increased by 236%.

The report doesn’t mention whether the chicken or the egg came first or if it was a partnership in tandem, but the studio’s team grew from 64 members one year ago to 120 teammates today.

While 2021 was a milestone year for the company’s overall growth with the games being found in just over 500 gaming sites at the beginning of 2022 – that number grew to 800 online storefronts by the end of the year. Just like in 2021, many of the new operations in 2022 were crypto casinos.

The company is headquartered in Malta, with development offices located in Poland and the Republic of Georgia. The company is looking toward further licenses in the regulated markets of Greece, Bulgaria, and Slovakia – adding to the Romanian license it was awarded in 2022.

Game Innovation

The company released two and a half dozen titles in 2022 – many of the games introduced innovative features and mechanics. It joined the fray with its first BTG Megaways game and its first cluster-pay game. Additional features rolled out included instant wins, reel resizing, collectible features, and in-game jackpots.

The company’s new TRUEWAYS mechanics were first seen in a re-release of the popular Elvis Frog slot. The reinvigorated Elvis Frog slot got a rousing response from players and made shortlists at industry awards presentations, including at the prestigious Global Gaming Awards.

Player-driven Approach

Over the past year, the company has strengthened its focus on being player-driven and one element of that is responsible gambling. Social media is bubbling with BGaming slot players and streamers too. Over the course of the year, Twitch carried over 100,000 minutes of BGaming games.

Bespoke games and brand exclusives

Over the last year, the company has ramped up its efforts to develop custom games for online casino operators. A bespoke/custom development process was created in 2021 and in 2022 the count of customized games reached over 70.

Other innovations

As we reported here earlier, the development team contrived an algorithm that lets them cut down the delivery size of instant play games by up 55% – faster-loading games are simply better games. The compression feature can ‘figure out’ which parts of an image or set of images can be highly compressed without compromising the end result image. The innovation was recognized at SBC Awards and by the iGaming Idol Award.

If history is any predictor of the future, based on the last few years we can expect to see more and greater technological and player engagement innovations in the year to come.

BGaming CEO, Marina Ostrovtsova said: “We’ve experienced significant growth across key metrics, obtained new licenses and certifications, experimented with various mechanics and features in our games, and received numerous awards and recognitions! All of these achievements are a testament to our team’s hard work and dedication, and we are excited to see what the future holds as we continue to innovate and deliver the best gaming experience possible. We also extend our sincere thanks to our customers and partners for their support and for helping us achieve these successes.”

Source: BGaming Celebrates Record Growth and Innovative Game Releases In 2022, BGaming, December 22, 2022

The post BGaming Recaps Year – Notes Growth, Game Releases appeared first on Casino News Daily.

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In the rogue’s gallery of con artists, a wing of that exhibit must be dedicated to impostors who have successfully fooled millions of people into believing they were princes, heiresses, celebrities and even time travelers.

The real danger from modern impostors is not someone claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son or a lost Russian princess – it’s from scammers pretending to be your boss, your bank manager, or even your own flesh and blood.

The Communication Factor

I’ve talked about impostors before but every year, new scams appear thanks to changes in social dynamics, new technology, and new ways of working.

How we communicate often defines how an impostor operates since the ability to verify their claims should be either limited or controlled to ensure the success of a lie.

In the past, the speed of global, national, or local communications was decided by the means of conveying the mail, it might take months to find out that someone is not the brother of Wyatt Earp or a missing Romanov princess.

This meant impostors could claim almost anything without fear of being proved a liar for weeks, months or years.

As technology improved from the telegraph to the internet, impostors became more sophisticated and used increasingly clever techniques to discourage interrogation of their claims.

Social compliance, politeness and deterrence all play a factor in this kind of con game, as does the con artist’s greatest technique, which is to offer people what they really want.

The play Six Degrees of Separation illustrates this perfectly with high-society suckers all too happy to be rubbing shoulders with the son of the great actor and director, Sidney Poitier, and all too self-satisfied to properly verify the impostor’s story.

This was based on real-life serial impostor, David Hampton, who would mingle with students from Columbia University and to gain immediate credibility, he would claim that his father was the legendary movie star.

This worked so well that he was soon able to mix with the great and the good of New York where his story gained him greater access to that world and he wasn’t discovered until the dean of Columbia’s school of journalism caught Hampton in his home with another man and the Poitier story (amongst others) quickly unraveled.

This all happened in a time when people could feasibly have investigated this young man’s story and quickly learned that he was not who he claimed to be, but such was the allure of that story and the sheer audacity of his claim, few questioned it at all.

Amazingly, he even mingled with other movie stars who promptly fell under the notion that only the real son of a fellow celebrity would make such claims to them since they were essentially part of the same “community.”

Investigating further might have taken a little more effort but today any search engine could inform anyone, regardless of their celebrity status, about a person’s real family or whether they have an estranged offspring bouncing around the Big Apple.

Or maybe not.

As the internet became more accessible, smart scammers found countless ways to take advantage of its flaws.

Smart impostors made websites or updated online open-source encyclopedias in order to provide quick and easily found proof of their spurious claims.

But for the emerging criminal industry of pretenders, the key to a great impostor scam became anonymity.

The Rise Of Remote Impostor Scams

Once technology made it easier to search facts and harder to make false claims, impostor scams retreated into another, long-proven method of pretending to be who they’re not: Remote scams.

Just as letters from afar could convince a wealthy family that their long-lost son had been found on the island of Fiji 200 years ago, texts and emails became a favorite method for modern-day pretenders around the world.

Thanks to this new form of communication, scammers could target elderly relatives claiming to be their grandchildren, nephews or nieces allegedly in a situation that required money to be sent urgently.

The rise of social media made it even easier for scammers to find perfect candidates bragging about their skiing holidays with enough information in their profiles to find a victim who might pay non-existent hospital bills after falling off a non-existent cliff.

This ability to hide behind technology created a booming criminal industry of impostors pretending to be our banks or internet suppliers or computer services in order to con people out of their hard-earned cash (I’ll talk about the mechanisms used for this type of scam in another article).

Spoofing phone numbers gave immediate proof that a scammer was who they pretended to be since that number would appear on their victims’ phones as the name of someone they knew.

This has been used to fool millions of people and is still used today by bogus businesses to make incoming calls (to you) appear to be from a local number when it’s actually from a criminal call center thousands of miles away.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg for existing impostor scams, but things are about to get a lot worse.

The Real Dangers Of Deepfakes

In movies like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible, characters can wear amazing silicone masks with miraculous voice changers taped to their neck that make them sound exactly like who they are impersonating.

In real life, this type of technology is not exactly practical in-person but used remotely, it could be devastating and thanks to modern times we are all communicating across video or voice calls that are about to become all-too-easy to fake.

Deepfake technology, where a video can be manipulated to change one person into another – even a familiar movie star or politician – has improved greatly in a short time, as has Deepfake voice software that can change anyone’s voice to sound exactly like someone else whose voice pattern and cadence has been previously analyzed.

This form of vocal impersonation is incredibly convincing and can already be transmitted live so that a con artist could contact the employee of a bank pretending to be a client or a manager that the target knows well enough to recognize their voice.

In concert with a few emails and other convincers, the scammer could then order that bank’s employee to transfer millions of dollars into the scammer’s accounts.

This sounds like it came right out of a movie but it’s already happened at least twice, with international authorities still trying to hunt down both the money and the pretenders at the other end of one such phone call.

Soon, the video version of this type of scam will happen as Deepfakes become even more sophisticated and computer processing power catches up with the idea of a live deep fake and while this will certainly be used by con artists (if it hasn’t already), the real danger to society is much greater than that.

Imagine suddenly not being able to trust your own eyes and not knowing whether who or what you see on screen is real.

Suddenly all news can be manipulated even more than it is today, video evidence will cease to be effective, and the world we’ve learned to see through the windows of our machines will cease to exist.

In the end, only the reality we experience directly might be trusted and as any magician will tell you, even reality can be distorted.

Lead image: Shutterstock

The History of the Mohawk Racetrack in Canada

Established in 1963, the Mohawk Racetrack in Canada is one of Ontario’s oldest harness racing tracks. It is owned by the Woodbine Entertainment Group, formerly the Ontario Jockey Club, which was founded in 1881 to improve the horse racing industry in Toronto. As it is one of the oldest horse racing operators, you can be confident the Mohawk Racetrack is entirely legitimate and safe.

On the 26th of April, the day of its establishment, the Woodbine Mohawk Park had barns for more than 800 horses. More than 4000 people attended races. As the track continued to gain popularity, it would host some of the most significant harness racing events in the world, such as Breeders Crown races, the World Driving Championship and the International Drivers Competition.

In 1999, the racetrack was also equipped with 750 slot machines, establishing a casino based on a program by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. That also came with creating a racebook that allowed for simulcasting racing events across the US. The racetrack was expanded and, in 2018, rebranded to Woodbine Mohawk Park, now hosting all harness racing events.

Starting in 2019, the Mohawk Racetrack in Ontario now hosts events all year long and, in that same year, hosted all 12 Breeders Crown events. Whether you want to relax or gamble on events rivalling the biggest horse races in the world, there is always something fun to enjoy at this track. Remember to gamble responsibly and that the legal gambling age is 19+.

Mohawk Racetrack, Ontario – Race Type and Events

The events at the Woodbine Mohawk Racetrack are all standardbred harness racing. Standardbred horses are an American breed, typically more muscular and heavier than thoroughbreds, designed to participate in harness races. Meanwhile, harness racing involves the horse trotting (moving legs diagonally) or pacing (moving legs laterally) while the driver sits in a small cart called a sulky.

Pacing races are typically the most popular, as the horses are faster and less likely to break stride. The start is also different, as horses trot after a car until a barrier is lifted to signal the beginning. While most famous horses are thoroughbreds, harness racing is still incredibly popular. The Mohawk casino racetrack is also host to many prestigious events, such as the following:

Mohawk Racetrack’s Signature Races

Aside from the regular races, the Mohawk Racetrack features many annual events that are just as exciting as the plots of the best horse racing movies. Some, such as the Canadian Pacing Derby, a pacing race for 3+-year-old horses, have been held since the 1930s. Its counterpart, the Maple Leaf Trot, has been around since the 50s and occurs on the same day.

Other major events, such as the Canadian Trotting Classic, feature the best horses from all over the US competing in a one-mile trotting event. Meanwhile, the Metro Pace is ideal for those who wish to see two-year-old pacers, the industry’s future stars, compete in their first big event. While most events have free admission, some, such as the North American Cup, may charge a fee.

The North American Cup is the biggest pacing event in Canada, with a prize of CA$ 1,000,000. While it has been around since 1984, it was first held in the Mohawk Racetrack in Canada in 2007. Two-year-old trotters can also compete for a million dollars through the Mohawk Million race, the track’s latest competition from 2020.

Although most competitors must buy a spot in the race, which can be traded, the winner of the William Wellwood memorial race earns a free spot. The Woodbine Mohawk live racing events are anticipated even by players at the best sports betting sites in Canada. Remember that gambling can be addictive, so please play responsibly.

Breeders Crown – Canada’s Most Famous Harness Racing Event

The Mohawk Racetrack in Ontario also occasionally hosts the Breeders Crown series of races. Breeders Crown features 12 events, covering every possible gender, gait and age in harness racing. The idea behind its creation in 1984 by the Hambletonian Society was to help the industry by making a huge event for every race category. Since then, it has been held annually at random tracks across the US and Canada.

With a more than CA$ 6 million prize pool, it is undoubtedly one of the most exciting events for harness racing fans. While the races were previously split across many tracks, in recent years, they are hosted at one track every year. For example, the Mohawk Racetrack hosted only the events for four-year-old horses, but in 2019 and 2022, it hosted all 12 events.

Mohawk Casino Racetrack’s Other Amenities

Whenever you wish to take a break from the exciting Woodbine Mohawk live racing events, there are multiple other ways you can have fun at the Mohawk Racetrack in Canada. For example, you can host a corporate or casual event at one of the many restaurants and VIP Suites, each equipped with a trackside view, TV and gambling facilities. There is also a 24/7 casino and regular restaurants open to everyone.

Mohawk Casino Racetrack – 24/7 Excitement

The Mohawk Racetrack in Ontario also features a fantastic casino with more than 1200 games. These include slot machines, ranging from casual one-cent slots to various jackpots, similar to the top Canadian slots. Additionally, you can find several e-tables with games such as blackjack and roulette or try the various table games with progressive jackpot titles and PVP poker tables.

The casino is open 24/7 and accommodates all types of players. Players can also benefit from a rewards program and participate in sports betting. Remember to prepare a budget in advance and always gamble responsibly.

The Mohawk Racetrack Restaurants – Riding & Dining

Those who wish to enjoy a meal while watching their favourite Woodbine Mohawk live racing competitions can do so at the many excellent bars and restaurants. These range from concession stands for quick snacks to trackside restaurants that let you get close to the action and VIP suites with dedicated TVs and betting terminals. There are also some bars close to the casino.

As mentioned earlier, the Mohawk Casino Racetrack also allows people to host events, and some of the bars even allow guests to sit next to the track itself and get a closer look at the events. Even if you can’t see the track, there are usually monitors to help you watch the race and the food matches some of the best restaurants in Las Vegas.

Remember to check the working hours in advance and make a reservation. Note that some bars are only open during a live race, so you’ll have to make sure you are familiar with the race schedule. Additionally, as some restaurants are in the casino, they can only accessed by 19+ year olds and there may also be a dress code.

Mohawk Racetrack Conclusion and Company Info

The Woodbine mohawk racetrack is owned by the Woodbine Entertainment Group, formerly the Ontario Jockey Club. It operates as a not-for-profit organization without shareholders; all income goes directly to improving its operations. With more than 150 years of experience, it is the biggest horse racing operator in Canada, with 80% of pari-mutuel wagering passing through its network.

Rest assured, some of the most reputable organizations supervise the company in Ontario. These include the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, Ontario Racing and the Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency. They all ensure that the company abides by the gambling laws in Canada. The company also works with the Responsible Gambling Council and the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation to help combat gambling addiction.

The Mohawk Racetrack is excellent for horse racing fans to enjoy betting on and watching their favourite events. From regular events to huge championships, this is the best track for harness racing events, and it seems as if it will continue to improve.

We hope you enjoyed our look into the Woodbine Mohawk Park. Aside from horse racing, there are many other ways to enjoy gambling Canada, such as at the best online casinos in Canada and players from Toronto can also try the best casino sites in Ontario. Always remember to play responsibly and be familiar with the relevant laws and authorities in Canada.

Mohawk Racetrack FAQ

Before wrapping up our Mohawk Racetrack overview, we will answer all your pressing questions. You can learn some extra details about the track, such as its location and schedule information. Additionally, we will review some important information on the amenities, including working hours and who owns the Mohawk Casino Racetrack.