A clandestine betting ring on sporting events worth over 50 million discovered thanks to an investigation by the Finance guard of Lucca coordinated by the Florence prosecutor's office.
There are 12 suspects who have been notified of the conclusion of the investigations, also involving 2 legal entities, ordered by the Florentine investigating judge a preventive seizure, against 5 people, of real estate, company shares, active balances of bank accounts, cash, cryptocurrencies, up to a value of 6 million euros.
This is explained in a note released by the Guardia di Finanza: “Following the investigations, the competent judge – the note explains – shared the requests formulated by the Florence Prosecutor's Office, recognizing the crime of association, the activity of illegal collection of bets”.
The investigations "have allowed, overall: to ascertain how the criminal association made use of the collaboration of over 100 betting agencies spread across the national territory (Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Lombardy, Lazio, Campania, Sicily); to identify over 1.000 gaming accounts, most of which were registered to third parties and moved by the suspects in the various bookmakers, with the carrying out of a gaming volume (so-called 'bet'), even exceeding one million euros per month for an amount equal to over 50.000.000 euros;
determine the so-called 'illegal profit' made by the criminal association; identify over 1.500.000 messages and almost 850.000 image files, through which the investigative hypothesis of abusive intermediation in the collection of sports bets was confirmed and widely established, as well as failure to comply with all anti-money laundering obligations, (given that untraceable money transfers emerged for individual transactions of amounts even exceeding 50.000 euros) all perpetrated in an associative form".
The preventive seizure of assets, it is further explained, is based on the investigations carried out by the military of the Guardia di Finanza Group of Viareggio who, during the execution, availed themselves of the collaboration of the specialists of the special unit for the protection of privacy and technological fraud.
