In the US, gambling scandals have ensnared a widening range of stakeholders, including athletes, casinos, soldiers, lawmakers and more, but this week, a plea agreement from former federal prosecutor Monica Dillon represented a rare case involving law enforcement.
On Tuesday, US District Judge Kenneth E Bell approved a guilty plea and pre-trial diversion agreement from Dillon, under which she pleaded guilty to five counts of identity theft. Dillon allegedly used the victims’ identities to open and profit from online gambling accounts. No online gambling or sports betting companies are named in the case. Both online gambling and mobile sports betting are legal in West Virginia.
The case was heard before the US District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, but Bell was brought in from North Carolina to hear the case due to potential conflicts of interest. Dillon previously served as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District for nearly 20 years. When reached by iGB on Thursday, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District declined to comment on the case.
According to a fact sheet filed in the case 22 April, Dillon used the five stolen identities to gamble online from January 2021 to January 2023. She profited at least $1,000 from three of the victims’ accounts, prosecutors said, but her plea agreement stipulates she will only pay $30,000 in restitution to one of them, referred to as “Victim 1”.
Additionally, she also must serve two years of probation under the US Probation Office but will avoid prison time. Absent the plea deal, the charges would have carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $500,000.
Dillon relinquished licence, filed for bankruptcy
According to her LinkedIn profile, Dillon spent a career in law enforcement and government service. She was an adviser to the Federal Bureau of Prisons for three years before serving as an attorney in the Southern District from 2005-2025.
Ironically, she served as a deputy chief for the district’s white-collar fraud team from 2021-2024, where she “led a team of eight attorneys in the investigation and prosecution of all the white-collar fraud, health care fraud, environmental, tax and civil rights prosecutions”, she said. Now, she has pleaded guilty to fraud herself.
Dillon’s West Virginia law licence was annulled via voluntary consent by the state’s Supreme Court in January 2025. The petition for annulment was filed by the Office of Lawyer Disciplinary Counsel in December 2024, which gave no reason or comment for the petition. According to Legal Newsline, the rule that the petition was filed under also essentially amounts to a plea deal. By voluntarily relinquishing her licence after the petition was filed, Dillon acknowledged she was subject to an investigation and potential charges she could not defend against.
There is no information in the fact sheet as to why Dillon stole the victims’ identities to open the gambling accounts, or how she procured their identities. But she did file for bankruptcy in 2022, which, according to Legal Newsline, is still pending in federal court. Given the timeline outlined in the fact sheet, Dillon was using the victims’ identity for gambling before and after the bankruptcy filing and while she was still practicing law.
In a plea agreement, Dillon gave up her right to withdraw the plea if the sentence was greater than she anticipated. Dillon conceded there was a “substantial likelihood,” that she would be incarcerated.
Concerning increase in integrity scandals
In the last decade, the number of gambling integrity scandals has expanded greatly in several directions.
Recent high-profile examples include the dealings of convicted bookmakers Matt Bowyer and Wayne Nix, the proliferation of anti-money laundering violations on the Las Vegas Strip, multiple sports integrity scandals involving active players and coaches, a host of insider trading concerns with prediction markets and more.
All of those matters are being adjudicated and rectified in their respective ways, but Dillon’s case highlights a new concern among law enforcement officials, especially given the lack of prison time or restitution among the other four victims.
By comparison, two men were indicted by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut in February for a much larger but similar scheme. In that case, Connecticut residents Amitoj Kapoor and Siddharth Lillaney reportedly stole some 3,000 identities to open accounts on multiple platforms, namely FanDuel. The duo netted approximately $3 million from the operation and face a multitude of charges, including 23 counts of wire fraud and eight counts of identity fraud.
“Individuals who commit identity theft of this magnitude deserve to be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” Thomas Demeo, special agent in charge of the IRS office in Boston, said in a statement. “It’s alleged those charged caused immeasurable hardship to the victims of their identity theft scheme. IRS Criminal Investigation remains committed to unravelling complex financial transactions and money laundering schemes where criminals attempt to conceal the true source of their money.”
Jess Marquez
Jess has covered the global gaming industry since 2022. A native of Reno, Nevada, he’d like to note that it’s Ne-va-da, not Ne-VAH-da.
Original article: https://igamingbusiness.com/legal-compliance/legal/dillon-judge-case-integrity/
