UK poker pro Darren Woods sentenced to £1mm + 15mos prison

There was a time when UK poker pro Darren Woods was a highly esteemed member of the live tournament circuit, and a feared competitor on the virtual felt. Those days are long gone, however, as the British card player will be spending at least the next 15 months behind bars.
Betonline   OnlinePokerRealMoney.co.uk tries to dispel some legal confusions stemming from passage of George Bush's UIGEA of 2006 . Federal status seems to depend on interpretation of the wire act and other laws which were crafted many years ago and which remained high level in nature. The United Kingdom has much clearer laws including their own real money gambling commission .

Darren Woods in prison for online poker fraud

Darren Woods @ 2011 WSOP

At the height of his fame, Darren Woods wasn’t exactly the exceptional poker pro we all thought he was. Yes, he did manage to take down a NLHE 6-Max World Series of Poker event in 2011, earning him a WSOP bracelet—that  certainly takes skill, and I’ll give him credit for that—but in the online poker realm, his assumed prowess turned out to be little more than smoke and mirrors.

From his home in Healing, North Lincolnshire, Woods spent years committing fraud at numerous European online poker sites. The terms and conditions of any respectable operator clearly state that multi-accounting—a single individual having more than one active account at an online poker site—is strictly prohibited. As Darren Woods can surely tell you himself, multi-accounting gives a player the ability to claim additional seats at the same poker table, viewing multiple hole cards and giving them a significant advantage by colluding against their unsuspecting opponents.

Allegations of collusions first surfaced when a “group of respected high-stakes players” collaborated in signing a very long, detailed letter that included mounds of evidence outing the British poker player as a cheat. The letter, for which the majority of the evidence revolved around games played on 888Poker, was published in the TwoPlusTwo forums.

A representative of 888Poker, where Darren Woods was a sponsored poker pro at the time, took notice and vowed to investigate the matter. Then, in the fall of 2014, allegations were brought against Darren Woods by an unnamed “Gibraltar–based company”, accusing him of collusion via multi-accounting between January 2007 and January 2012 (coincidentally stopping right around the time the above-mentioned letter was published).

Although the actual operator was not named in the public filings of the case, it’s fairly safe to assume that the allegations stemmed from 888Poker, where Darren Woods played under the moniker “DooshCom” both before and after being named a sponsored poker pro.

At first, Woods pled not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, but just days into the trial, reversed his plea to guilty on 9 counts. Throughout the hearings, it was revealed that Woods had quite an elaborate set-up going, in fact. To support his multiple accounts without being detected by the online poker sites he visited, Woods ran games on several computers across various internet connections. That gave him the appearance of being different people, all logging in from different IP addresses.

Woods was sentenced to 15 months in prison for his crimes and has already had £911,217 in personal assets seized. On top of his jail time, the UK poker pro was given six months to pay £1,000,000 in restitution, lest he be forced spend an additional 6 years behind bars. According to prosecutors, Woods should be able to cover the debt, estimating he has another £1.4 million in assets to draw from other various online poker accounts across Europe.

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