Finally people keep saying it has been reported to the police, however they also said that someone had to go to a station to log it. Who did this, what stage are they up to. He could easily be charged for obtaining money by deception (wsop thread) and i imagine, once we find out what he did, money laundering too. I would really like to know where this is up to? This is why he is biding time as it is currently what he fears the most.
I did say I wasn't going to comment again (and maybe this is out of date given the last few posts that I haven't really read yet) but all these dozens of pages of guesswork and flimsy opinion and irrelevant details and questions have made me want to change my mind... It's not really fair to pick on robbiebox who just posted, but really, what sort of "enlightenment" are you going to get from knowing where he was living or who he went to school with..? The story is really basically very simple - he lied to get money, some of which he lost gambling and some of which he just stole. (
Why he did it, on the other hand, is an incredibly complex question with an incredibly complex answer (too complex, I would hazard, for his school friends to help much with). So in fact is how he did it, though kinboshi's 'groupthink' references go some way towards explaining that.
Anyway, going back to
what he did, Guy's comments and questions above seem the most pertinent on this thread for ages. I don't really know where all the people who were saying there couldn't be a criminal case to answer got that idea from - maybe if any of them want to repeat that opinion they could say where it comes from?
I enquired about this myself, and a criminal barrister tells me they see no reason at all why he couldn't be charged with fraud, theft and as Guy says, possibly money laundering as well. Charging with fraud is apparently a simpler business since the Fraud Act of 2006 - basically if you lie to get money, that'll pretty much do. Some of the apparent offences could perhaps be charged either as fraud or as theft, or indeed as both.
If I were directly involved in this, I might at this stage be willing to write off my 'investment', but I don't think I'd be willing to let the perpetrator just get away with this, possibly with £50k of stolen cash. As far as I can see it would only really take one person to report it properly to the police (as Guy asks, this is presumably not really what is meant by the police having 'been informed', however big the point size in which these words are written?) and get a crime reference number, to which everyone else involved could then refer in reporting it themselves. Not a great deal of effort individually, but would surely cause the authorities to take the matter fairly seriously, when they have dozens of people reporting the same offences.
Anyway, good luck with it if you do choose to do anything. I'm off to not comment on this again, again.
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