Unsolved Mysteries of Gambling Part 5: Where in the World is WSEX’s Jay Cohen?

Where is Jay Cohen?

Internet sports betting's biggest bandit has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, ever since the online sportsbook he co-founded, World Sports Exchange, went belly up in 2013 and stiffed hundreds of customers out of thousands of dollars.

His whereabouts and what happened to him are questions pondered by many of those who were stiffed, and are the subject of the latest installment in Gambling 911's continuing series, "Unsolved Mysteries of Gambling."

Cohen and Steve Schillinger, both stockbrokers from San Francisco, co-founded the world's first online sportsbook in 1997 in Antigua, after Schillinger got kicked out of the Pacific Exchange for booking sports bets on the exchange floor and he convinced Cohen to come with him to an obscure Caribbean island to set up a sports betting operation on a new contraption called the Internet.

World Sports Exchange--WSEX for short--was born.

And it thrived, despite Cohen and Schillinger being charged in 1998 with Federal crimes related to online bookmaking (they were part of the infamous "Internet 21," the first bust of offshore online gambling operators).

While Schillinger stayed behind, Cohen returned to the U.S. to face the charges in court (he was the only "Internet 21" member to do so).

He lost his trial and served a year and a half in Federal prison, before doing time in a halfway house and then returning to free life.

As part of Cohen's probation upon being released from the halfway house was the stipulation that he no longer be involved in online gambling.

He abided by that for a while, but then secretly returned to Antigua to help run WSEX with Schillinger, in violation of his probation agreement.

Not long after his return, WSEX started running out of money and started slow-paying and no-paying its customers who had won monies wagering on sporting events and wanted to collect.

Then, shockingly--but then again, maybe not so--WSEX announced on its website, wsex.com, one morning in early 2013 that it had gone out of business.

Any WSEX customers with funds in their betting accounts would not be getting paid.

Days later, Schillinger was found by Antiguan police shot to death in the head in his luxury condo in St. John's, Antigua's largest city and capital.

The death appared to be a suicide, as a note was found near the body.

WSEX was gone.

Schillinger was gone.

And Cohen was nowhere to be found.

Also missing: hundreds of thousands of dollars--perhaps millions--owed to WSEX customers.

Where was Cohen, the customers wanted to know.

And where was the missing money?

It's now been nearly three years since WSEX went the way of the dodo bird.

And in all that time there hasn't been one sighting of Jay Cohen.

Did he return to San Francisco, where he lived while working at the Pacific Exchange?

Did he go back to Long Island, New York, where he is originally from?

There's even been speculation that he may have joined another WSEX employee and "Internet 21" member, Haden Ware, who fled to Germany before WSEX went under.

And then of course there's always the possibility that a degenerate gambler like Cohen resurrected in Las Vegas, where he would feel comfortably at home, especially with the loss of his online bookmaking gig.

Cohen hasn't just disappeared offline, but online as well.

While involved in running WSEX, Cohen frequently posted comments (using shilling WSEX) on online posting forums such as The Prescription (therx.com) and Major Wager (majorwager.com).

Since WSEX's demise, however, Cohen hasn't posted anywhere, at least under his real name.

But, Gambling 911 can now reveal though that Cohen is suspected of posting disparaging comments on Gambling911.com after an article was published on the site about an Ohio man owed thousands of dollars by WSEX.

Although the comments--mostly about the article's author and not the article itself--were posted anonymously, it used strikingly similar language and references used by Cohen previously when commenting elsewhere about the same author.

The Gambling 911 comments were traced to San Francisco.

So is Jay Cohen hiding out in the City by the Bay, the town known as Frisco, the place where Tony Bennet left his heart?

Is he in Nob Hill or the Castro District, or perhaps on that nearby island called Alcatraz?

Jay Cohen--phone home--a lot of people want their money!

But until he does, or appears in public, he whereabouts remain...an unsolved mystery of gambling.

By Tom Somach

Gambling 911 Staff Writer

tomsomach@yahoo.comReporter