Daniel Tzvetkoff was born in 1983 in Brisbane, Queensland. He dropped out of an information technology degree at the Queensland University of Technology in 2003 and started a series of small online businesses. In 2007, at the age of 24, he founded Intabill, a payment processing company designed to move money between online merchants and credit card networks.
The merchants that ended up using Intabill were not, on the face of the company's marketing materials, online poker sites. The publicly stated business of Intabill was generic e-commerce payment processing for hard-to-process merchants such as nutraceutical companies and adult entertainment sites. The actual majority of the company's volume came from the four largest online poker sites operating in the US market: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and UltimateBet.
The structure mattered. United States banks would not process payments labeled as gambling. The 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act had made it a federal crime for a bank to knowingly process a transaction connected to an illegal online gambling operation. The major poker sites continued to operate in the US market after 2006, but they needed payment processors willing to label the inbound and outbound transactions as something other than gambling. Intabill provided that service. The transactions that flowed through Intabill bank accounts were labeled as purchases of golf clubs, jewelry, dog food, and dozens of other consumer categories.
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The company's volume scaled fast. At the 2009 peak, Intabill was processing an estimated 500 million dollars per year in poker-related payment flow. Tzvetkoff's personal share of the resulting revenue was substantial. He acquired an Australian residential property portfolio valued at approximately 80 million Australian dollars. He purchased a Lamborghini, a Bentley, and a series of luxury yachts. He chartered a private jet on a routine basis between Brisbane and the major iGaming conference cities of Las Vegas, London, and Barcelona.
The exposure caught up in late 2009. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Postal Inspection Service, had been mapping the financial flows of US-facing online poker since 2007. By the end of 2009, the federal investigators had identified Intabill as the largest single processor in the network. The plan was to arrest Tzvetkoff when he next entered United States territory.
On April 16, 2010, Tzvetkoff arrived at the Encore Las Vegas for the iGaming North America conference. The conference was an industry event for the same offshore-licensed gambling sector that Intabill served. Federal agents arrested him in his hotel suite that morning. He was transported to the Manhattan Detention Complex in New York and arraigned in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The charging document listed bank fraud, money laundering, and operating an illegal gambling business under 31 USC 5363. The maximum sentence on the combined charges was approximately 75 years. The Tzvetkoff defense team was led by John Cline of the San Francisco law firm Jones Day. The prosecution was led by Assistant United States Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown of the Southern District of New York.
Within weeks, the defense and the prosecution had begun cooperation discussions. Tzvetkoff was a 27-year-old first-time defendant with no prior criminal record, facing a federal sentence that could have run into the decades. He had detailed operational knowledge of the entire US-facing online poker payment flow. He had access to bank routing records, transaction labeling logs, and direct communications with the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and UltimateBet.
The cooperation agreement was signed by mid-2010. Tzvetkoff spent the following six months providing detailed evidence to federal investigators. He identified specific bank accounts that had been used to move poker funds. He produced records of the merchant category code manipulation that had allowed the transactions to pass through credit card networks. He gave testimony on the structure of the relationships between the payment processors and the offshore-licensed poker sites.
On April 15, 2011, the federal government unsealed indictments against PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker, plus 11 individual defendants associated with the three companies. The action came to be known as Black Friday in the poker community. The three sites immediately stopped accepting US customers. Domain names were seized. Player balances were frozen. The legal US online poker market, which had operated in a regulatory grey zone since the 2006 UIGEA, was effectively shut down overnight. The Black Friday indictments were filed exactly one year after Tzvetkoff's April 16, 2010 arrest, and the evidentiary backbone of the case was the cooperation Tzvetkoff had provided in the intervening twelve months.
Tzvetkoff was granted full immunity in exchange for his cooperation. He returned to Australia in 2011 and rebuilt a quieter life in Brisbane outside the online gambling sector. He has spoken in only a handful of interviews about the case in the years since. The most detailed public account of the case is the 2024 memoir The Hot Seat, written by Tzvetkoff with the Australian journalist Tom Wright. The book covers the rise of Intabill, the Encore Las Vegas arrest, the cooperation agreement, and the cumulative effect of the Black Friday indictments on the online poker industry.
The structural effect of the case is now permanent. The US online poker market never returned to its pre-Black Friday scale. The fragmented state-by-state legal market that has developed since 2013 (in New Jersey, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and a handful of other states) generates approximately 600 million dollars in annual revenue, compared to the estimated 2 billion dollars per year that the offshore market had generated at its 2010 peak. The Tzvetkoff case is the operational pivot point in that history. A 27-year-old Australian payment processor, arrested in a Las Vegas hotel suite, became the cooperating witness whose evidence ended the largest grey-market online gambling industry in the United States.