Twenty seven people spanning four U.S. states have been hit with criminal charges following an NYPD investigation and breakup of a massive online sports gambling ring that took in over $3.3 billion in a four year time span. Based in Queens County New York, the operation - PlayWithal Sportsbook - was headed by poker professional, James Giordano, whose home was raided by police in June of this year. Enough evidence was gathered to trace Playwithal Sportsbook to gambling wiring rooms on the island of St. Marten and Miami, FL.

As a result of the raid on Giordano's home, investigators were able to make a digital copy of a laptop that contained all of the essential information needed to track the business operations of Playwithal. This led to several businesses in four states, several of which were based in Florida. Two such Florida-based company's that were named in the thirty-three count Enterprise Corruption indictment earlier this week are Primary Digital Solutions and Prolexic Technologies.

Prolexic Technologies was the first of the indicted company's to address the charges. Their response came as a surprise, and could very well reflect poorly on the cyber investigation currently underway. According to Prolexic, they have been wrongly named as the Web Hosting provider of PlayWithal. Primary Digital Solutions has not addressed the charges as of yet. They are a provider of web design services, which in itself, does not appear to be tantamount in facilitating illegal online gambling.

Prolexic, which has been instrumental in helping the U.S. and U.K. governments track Russian mafia computer hackers using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) to crash online casino sites for ransom, says that traceroute computer network testing was used to identify them as the host server of Playwithal. However, the truth of the matter is that Prolexic was only providing DDoS preventive services, i.e., helping to mask the IP address of the actual server itself.

While there may be hope for Prolexic, the bottom line is that, in the eyes of the Queens County District Attorney's Office, online sports betting is an illegal activity. Considering the state of New York banks on land-based sports betting and horseracing, which is precisely what Playwithal was offering, it comes as no surprise why the Fed's went to great lengths in making several busts resulting in the seizure of millions of dollars in cash and property.

It comes as even lesser of a surprise that without online casino and gambling regulatory framework in place, cases like these will likely turn out much for the worse, later down the road. Instead of running fair online betting operations that are legitimate within the interests of the people, but just not so in the eyes of the government, more businesses will be turning to illegitimate means to make money off of U.S. online gamblers who are going to keep betting no matter what the law says.