In what is turning out to be Black Friday in the poker world, the FBI has seized the domain names of the largest online poker sites operating in the United States, UB Poker, Absolute Poker, PokerStars, and Full Tilt Poker. Many areas of the world are greeted with an FBI seizure notice when logging into any of these sites homepages –the poker rooms themselves still appear to functioning fine as they are separate entities—while the DNS caches in some parts of the world have yet to be refreshed, and still show the normal website homepage.

Keep in mind that while this is a very real threat, Bodog Poker has gone through the same seizure years ago, and came out regaining their domain name.

Both Reuters and CNBC have broken the news that in addition to the seizure of the domain names, the sites have been charged with both fraud and illegal gambling. Here is the tweet from CNBC:

Three Largest Internet Poker Companies Charged With Fraud, Illegal Gambling – Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker, & Absolute Poker – Charged

For their part Reuters has a banner across the top of the page with the news. No official story has been broken yet regarding the specifics of the case, but we promise to keep you updates as details emerge.

Update:

It has now been revealed that the FBI has indicted 11 people who are thought to be the owners of these poker sites. Each has been indicted on numerous charges. The full list of indictees is: Chad Elie, John Campos, Isai Scheinberg, Raymond Bitar, Paul Tate, scott Tom, Ryan Lang, Ira Rubin, Bradley Franzen, Nelson Burnick and Brent Beckley.

In further news reports have been emerging from the poker world that players in certain regions of the USA can no longer access the poker tables with the following messages appearing.
At the Full Tilt Poker tables a message box appeared during games stating:

“We are sorry but, due to government regulations, playing real money tournaments is not allowed in your area.”

A similar message appeared on Pokerstars saying:

“We are sorry but, due to government regulations, playing real money ring games is not allowed in your area”.

For players in the USA who still want to play poker there are still a few options, the best of which is one of the top US poker sites – LockPoker.eu

>> Click here to visit Lock Poker <<