My question involves a consumer law issue in the State of: New York
Hello and thank you in advance for any responses and advice.
I'm Michael and I'm from NYC.
I was contacted by an acquaintance I used to speak to on social media, if I was interested in betting sports online. I was interested and deposited over a few weeks into PayPal accounts using the friends and family option to the betting sites owners accounts. Before starting to bet he sent a form over to sign, that was an authorization form saying I received financial consultation and that the payments to the PayPal email was all legitimate. I never truly received any type of financial consultation since it was all for online gambling.
I ended up losing over $10,000 and I had about $500 left in my account, and he said the website is having an issue that they're moving all the accounts to another website they've partnered with. I ended up having about $300 in the account after a week or so, when the guy said he has to either cash me out or move me to another place due to the acquaintance of mine having issues with his account. He moved me to another betting site with the money I had left in my account. Now, I did some googling afterwards, and found out that that website has a few negative reviews. Especially recently, by another member stating that he had gotten scammed by the website where they took his money and ran, even the winnings th and another website reporting from a few people that it was a scam website. So, what I believe happened was even if I won I wouldn't have gotten anything paid to me.
So I decided to call PayPal and they said they can't help me there since the deposits were sent by friends and family option which PayPal has no protection for the sender. They told me to call my bank, which I did and they said they'll be investigating it, where they made me send screenshots of the chats between the site employee from Twitter messaging, (where I deleted a few of the messages) along with the deposits made and them basically saying that it was a fake PayPal I sent the money to.
Another day passes and a guy contacts me on Twitter and says that he was also kicked off the site, and that he feels like we all got scammed. I spoke a little to him, and he decided to send part of our chat to the email of the guy who kicked us all off to try to scare him by saying he'll report it to the bank as well.
He then tells the guy to tell me that he sent the chat to PayPal and he has the form (which wasn't even close the the signature on my drivers license) and will win the chargeback. He then tells the guy that he Intends to file falsifying evidence and fraud charges against me.
If he's US based, how is he running a gambling operation? If he's Europe based as he claims, don't you have to be in NY to press charges? But then isn't it illegal for the credit card company to process the deposit to the company? Then again, isn't the UIGEA forbidding US people to play?