News in brief: Allied Systems owner settles; Zynga; Betfair; PartyCasino...
The owner of two payment processors for US-facing egaming sites has agreed to forfeit US$13.3m of monies seized by the FBI in June last year...
The owner of two payment processors for US-facing egaming sites has agreed to forfeit US$13.3m of monies seized by the FBI in June last year to settle claims the funds constituted “proceeds of the illegal transmission of gambling information and operating an illegal gambling business.” The payments to players processed by Ahmad Khawaja and his Allied Wallet and Allied Systems firms were alleged by federal prosecutors to be traceable to PokerStars, among other egaming sites. The US government has since returned US$2.51m to Allied Wallet after determining these funds were unrelated to poker or gaming. Allied Wallet now continues to process transactions for all mainstream e-commerce businesses internationally but has pulled out of the US market for poker processing.
Zynga has launched the first localised version of its Facebook-focused Zynga Poker game. Zynga Texas Poker will be available in Mandarin Chinese for Facebook players in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Zynga Poker is currently played by 28 million people a month, making it the world’s largest online form of the game.
Betfair is to launch its biggest-ever marketing campaign aimed at positioning itself as ‘The World’s Biggest Betting Community’. The ‘Cut Out The Middleman’ campaign created by the Albion London agency will launch on TV and online on 21 August, demonstrates how Betfair’s unique betting exchange proposition gives people better odds than they would get from traditional bookmakers. A UK and European TV push will be supported by global online PR, CRM, natural and paid search strategies.
PartyCasino is to release three new games developed by NexGen Gaming, Slide-a-Wild, SuperBet and Select-a-Play.