Poker Player Dennis Blieden Sentenced to 6.5 Years for Stealing $22 Million
Poker player Dennis Blieden, 31, was sentenced to 79 months in prison house on Midweek for embezzling $22 trillion from a digital marketing and talent authority that looked after societal media influencers.
In February 2018, the Cincinnati indigene won the World Poker Tour’s LA Poker Classic for $1 million. But those win were just a put down inward the ocean compared with the money he had already stolen from his employer, Hollywood-based StyleHaul Inc.
Blieden was the VP of accounting and finance for StyleHaul from Oct 2019 and had verify of its bank accounts. According to an internal SyleHaul memo filed past prosecutors, inwards 2017 solo he misappropriated $15 million.
He did this by wiring immediate payment to his personal account, spell creating imitation accounting records and phoney horse opera Union letters so it would come out money was going to clients.
Fake Lifestyle
Prosecutors said this allowed him to unrecorded come out a fantasize elite-poker lifestyle, entering the biggest tournaments, playing in the biggest cash in games, and rubbing shoulders with players he’d previously only idolized on TV.
And he curried favor with his unexampled friends by patronage them inward tournaments. He issued more than $1 billion in checks to other players, according to court of justice filings.
Blieden also invested some of the stolen money inwards cryptocurrency, which accumulated value. But this was not enough to offset the money he missed gaming on online stove poker and slots, as easily on the live stove poker circuit.
An internal StyleHaul investigation in 2019 uncovered Blieden’s transgressions. In an question in Mar that yr with buster troupe executives, he lied when asked how much was left hand of the totality he had stolen.
He said he had around $50,000 in his personal accounts and some cryptocurrency inward various e-wallets.
But according to the feds, he subsequently dropped $3 gazillion into expansion slot machines inward Las Vegas after he stony-broke upwards with his longtime girlfriend.
StyleHaul Collapse
StyleHaul could not hold out Blieden’s financial abuse. The unwavering once had 5,000 digital influencers on its books, including YouTube and Instgram stars Zoella, Joey Graceffa, and Dulce Candy, and claimed to bring forth 2.5 one thousand million views per month.
It ab initio planned to close its US trading operations and relocate to London, but it folded for sound inwards May 2019.
In a pre-sentencing letter to Calif. Central District Judge André Birotte Jr., Blieden blamed his conduct on his dependency to gambling and amphetamines.
Following his WPT win, he said he was “outwardly validated within the stove poker community of interests and from my peers as being a professional person gambler, so I did everything I could to dungeon that reputation alive.
“I was chasing my debt, but also attempting to hold on upwardly with a lifestyle that was a lie,” he confessed.