Gambling Site Stake.com Denies Ties to Collapsed Crypto Exchange FTX Lawyer

Our colleagues over at CoinGeek had been reporting on the warped relationship between failed crypto exchange FTX and an attorney once caught up in a high profile online poker cheating scandal long before FTX actually collapsed last last year.

Daniel Friedberg really gets around it seems.

We are learning that Friedberg once played a role in the launch of Stake.com, though its founders are distancing themselves from that relationship in light of all that has transpired in recent months.

A recent Financial Times story on Stake.com detailed how founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani sought advice from Dan Friedberg before the website's launch in 2017.

More than a decade prior, Friedberg helped orchestrate the cover-up of an insider cheating scandal that stole millions of dollars from an online poker site's players.

Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani were previously involved in the crypto gaming space, having launched the SatoshiDice website.  It is still in existence today.

Steven Stradbrooke of CoinGeek notes that the chance meeting with Friedberg moved slightly beyond the "passing stage".  Stake.com's founders insist it got no further than that.

The FT reported that Friedberg “worked largely on Primedice,” but Craven added that “a lot of [the work to set up Stake] was ran past” Friedberg. Craven said Friedberg “took on the position of trying to analyze…what the legal landscape looked like, and he tried to give us the best advice possible on what is legal and what was not.”

Having second thoughts regarding his partner’s decision to paint Friedberg as an authority on coloring within the legal lines, Tehrani had a representative contact the FT to claim that Friedberg had provided only “passing advice” on Primedice and the Stake co-founders “only ever had a few conversations” with Friedberg.

Last year, Stake.com found itself the subject of a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York by one Christopher Freeman.  He claimed to have come up with both the Primedice and Stake concepts but was muscled out of his 20% stake in the companies.

The Florida-based Freeman is currently seeking $400 million in damages from his former partners.

Craven and Tehrani’s claim Freeman's involvement was “fleeting”, a similar assertion they make in regard to Friedberg.

But it gets worse if Craven and Tehrani’s other allegations are correct.  They allege Freeman treated Primedice’s cold wallet as his “personal piggy bank” and unlawfully transferred tens of millions of dollars in digital assets to his own personal account held on the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

While probably not qualifying as "fleeting" at this point, Freeman is also accused by the two of actively encouraging US citizens to use VPNs to access Stake in violation of local restrictions.  The current Stake.com website directs users in the US to click on the Stake.us link that directs them to social casino games.

Stake.com enjoys a partnership with recording artist and self-professed high rolling gambler, Drake.   The company mostly enjoys a polished reputation and has grown to become one of Canada's top online gambling sites.

- Nagesh Rath, Gambling911.com