BetonSports.com, the domain name of the online gambling site shut down by the US government in 2006, has been sold. The once mighty domain name was sold this week via registrar GoDaddy for a mere $4,900 to a Costa Rica resident named Deana Morley. Morley was once the president of Bulma International SA, a Costa Rica-based firm that listed BetOnSports founder Gary Kaplan as its secretary, which suggests that Kaplan may have just got his baby back.
The domain itself “is currently being parked” by its owner, but one can’t help but wonder what plans are afoot that would require the now infamous domain. When the UK-listed BetonSports closed down in October 2006, it left a host of investors holding worthless stock certificates and thousands of ordinary sports bettors with no way of redeeming the funds stranded in their BetonSports accounts.
The July 16, 2006 arrest in Dallas of BetonSports CEO David Carruthers while he was awaiting a connecting flight to Costa Rica marked the beginning of the United States Department of Justice crackdown on online gambling. Before the year was out, President George W. Bush had signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) into law, the UK’s publicly traded online gambling companies had all exited the US market and BetonSports was defunct.
In Jan. 2010, after three and a half years under house arrest, Carruthers reached a plea deal with US prosecutors that saw him sentenced to 33 months in prison. Carruthers was transferred to a UK prison in April 2011 before being released on house arrest that July. Kaplan was arrested in the Dominican Republic in March 2007 and extradited to the US, where he received a 51-month sentence in August 2009. Kaplan, who also agreed to forfeit $50m as part of his plea deal, was reportedly released in Oct. 2011.
