California man forfeits $90k for gambling in New Jersey

A California man is forfeiting $90,000 from funds in his New Jersey online gambling accounts on account of the fact that he doesn’t live in New Jersey but has been gambling online there from his home in California anyways.
The gambler in question, Vinh Dao, somehow managed to bypass some of the most sophisticated geo-tracking software in the business to convince NJ gaming sites that he was actually in New Jersey, when he never even left his California home. Even worse, Dao had been working his ruse almost continuously from the day regulated online gambling was introduced in Garden State until quite recently.
Details of how Dao worked his scheme are still quite unclear, but here’s what we know so far. In February 2014, about three months after online gambling was launched in New Jersey, Dao likely used a virtual private network (VPN) to mask his California IP address from NJ geo-tracking software. Once he convinced the state’s electronic watch dogs that he was a New Jersey resident, he was off and running.
For the next four years, Dao gambled at his leisure and seems to have done pretty well. When authorities from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) discovered his ruse, Dao had more than $92,000 in his gaming accounts – though it’s unclear what games he was playing.
According to a report from the Associated Press, Dao forfeited $90,000 of that money to the State of New Jersey, but was allowed to keep $2,500 of it as a reward for cooperating with authorities. The forfeited funds will be split between programs for problem gamblers and senior citizens.