News

Monday, 19 April 2010 02:46

The spectacular rise and fall of online payments entrepreneur Daniel Tzvetkoff hits rock bottom as he faces the prospect of a 75 year US jail term.

Tzvetkoff, 27 was arrested on Friday while in Las Vegas, where he has since made an appearance at a federal court, after which he was detained pending a bail hearing set for Wednesday 21st April. According to the fifteen page long indictment, Daniel Tzvetkoff will face charges including bank fraud conspiracy, money laundering, gambling conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.

Mace Yampolsky, his defence lawyer in the case, has said that his client had become distraught over the charges and would be applying for bail. Born in Ipswich, England the relatively unknown businessman suddenly shot to prominence back in 2008 when he founded the Australian based online payments processing company, Intabill. At the company's peak, Intabill was employing 120 people at its office in Milton. Tzvetkoff also made it into The Sunday Mail's Rich List in 2008, with a personal fortune worth $82 million. He was a young man, who appeared to have everything, but it didn't last and his fall from those lofty heights was as meteoric as his rise.

US Attorney's Office prosecutors allege that Tzvetkoff assisted several illegal Internet gambling companies with laundering approximately $540 million into a number of offshore accounts. Tzvetkoff, it is alleged then duped a number of banks that have bans in place on credit card transactions related to online gambling into treating the gambling transactions he put through as just ordinary transactions. Using this system, he was able to make use of the Automated Clearing House (ACH) system to transact a vast amount of funds between the United States and a complex web of British Virgin Islands based companies.

The indictment details emails that were obtained by federal investigators and alleges that a co-conspirator, unnamed, had boasted about the hiring of programmers who were used to develop a collection of unique websites linked to shell companies. This co-conspirator believed that even if someone were investigating the companies, there was no way those companies could be tied together. Authorities allege that Tzvetkoff had replied to at least one of these emails suggesting it was all perfect.

Following his recent problems with the fall of his business empire, culminating in the lawsuit for $100 million by Sam Sciacca, his ex-business partner, Tzvetkoff now faces a far more serious battle for his liberty, a long way from home.