[cattown]

Doesn’t sound that profitable to me. $7m is a lot of money. But not that much after building all of that custom tech, setting up a dedicated space, training and paying a whole bunch of people to run these games. Then whatever’s left over gets split between multiple crime families? Seems like a lot of work.

[Aurornis]

This is likely one part of a larger operation including blackmail opportunities, as others have mentioned.

However, don't overlook the value of $7 million in cash and cryptocurrency. For an organized crime operation that's a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from an actual business subject to taxes, business records, and bank tracking. This was an easy way to get millions of hard to trace dollars into accounts they could use.

[cellis]

Whenever some group is said to have made/fined 1M out of their likely billions in revenue, someone will chime and say “that’s nothing”. But From a “department P&L perspective” yes, it is a lot of money!

Think about the crime families as making e.g. 50% money from construction corruption, 40% from drug sales, 5% from extortion… someone has to run the other smaller departments and that is a lot of money for that “Dept Head”. Also from the FBIs perspective they want to unravel conspiracies, often by yanking on one piece of yarn like this one.

[ranadomo]

as others have speculated, the real money was probably in blackmail and rigged sports betting.

[dec0dedab0de]

That was my first thought, especially because they could get similar results with a marked deck. To me, this leads more credibility to it being part of a bigger operation.

[mattmaroon]

Well it’s kind of an annuity. A million a year ain’t nothing for a small operation.

But yeah they surely make much more selling fentanyl.