Another California Bookie Arrested In Offshore Bookie Scheme

California sports betting might not be legal, but let’s not pretend it’s not happening en masse. Californians are finding ways to bet, and bet often.

For one, there are prediction markets. Hell, we know this for a fact. The top platform, Kalshi, said as much as 40 percent of the volume it does on sports contracts comes from states without legal sports betting. They said that’s mainly from California and Texas.

Offshore betting and/or personal bookies are also behemoths in the Golden State. This number is harder to track, but the state has been a magnet for arrests in this area.

Add one more massive arrest to the list of many. That’s right, California cracked down on another bookmaker running an illegal operation out of the state. Keep on reading, and we’ll explain what happened and the obvious pattern we’ve seen inside California.

Another Cali Bookie Bites The Dust

Jason Noah Feinman, a Calabasas resident, was just sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for operating an illegal offshore gambling business. For those now in the know, Calabasas is one of the nice neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles. And with the scale of Feinman’s operation, it was no doubt affordable for the bookie.

According to the Department of Justice, Feinman was the leader of an online gambling ring. Prosecutors say he maintained and operated a website that allowed customers to wager through offshore betting operations. Of course, none of this is legal in California. No sports betting or any kind is allowed stateside.

And business was booming for Feinman. Federal authorities say he laundered millions of dollars generated from the operation. One of the schemes allegedly involved exchanging large amounts of cash for checks written from one of his businesses. Between 2018 and 2024, prosecutors say Feinman gave one customer more than $1.5 million in cash, which eventually came back to him through a series of checks totaling the same amount. Overall, authorities estimate somewhere between $1.5 million and $3.5 million moved through similar exchanges.

If that wasn’t enough, the government says Feinman also skipped out on taxes. A lot of taxes, actually. Investigators determined he failed to pay taxes on roughly $4.2 million in income tied to the gambling operation between 2018 and 2022. In one particularly bold example, prosecutors say Feinman earned approximately $1.8 million in 2020 while reporting zero taxable income to the IRS. Must be nice, eh?

This case is over with, by the way. With a mountain of evidence stacked against him, Feinman pleaded guilty to operating an illegal gambling business, money laundering, and tax evasion. So he’s off to jail for a tad over two years (and maybe less if he behaves himself).

Feinman isn’t the first bookie to be arrested in the state. And we doubt he’ll be the last…

California Will Keep Attracting Illegal Sports Betting

Without a legal industry, California has become ground zero for these kinds of gambling scandals. The most famous case was the one that embroiled Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for Shohei Ohtani. Federal investigators say Mizuhara stole nearly $17 million from Ohtani and funneled much of it into an illegal bookmaker operating out of California named Matt Bowyer. Last year, Bowyer was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison and ordered to forfeit millions in assets from the investigation that sprawled way beyond just Mizuhara.

Then there’s Wayne Nix, another Southern California bookmaker whose operation was so large it reportedly took bets from professional athletes, former athletes, and wealthy businessmen. Nix — a former minor league baseball player — eventually pleaded guilty to operating an illegal sports gambling business after federal investigators spent years unraveling the network. Prosecutors said the operation handled tens of millions of dollars in wagers and ran for years before authorities shut it down.

Given those examples (plus others we didn’t even mention), Feinman’s story feels less like a one-off incident and more like another chapter in an ongoing trend. California keeps producing these cases because California keeps producing bettors. Lots of them — and those bettors have nowhere to go.

The state has nearly 40 million residents, multiple professional sports teams, and one of the strongest gambling appetites in the country. If there’s any itch to bet, most of them will do it, even if it’s illegally with sketchy characters.

The irony is that legal sports betting in California doesn’t appear particularly close either. Tribal groups have started laying the groundwork for a potential 2028 ballot initiative, but that’s still years away and far from guaranteed to work. Californians already rejected two sports betting measures back in 2022, including one led by the tribes. So who’s to say they’d suddenly be in favor next time out?

So yes, don’t expect these stories to stop in California. There’s just too much pent-up demand for sports betting inside the state. If Californians can’t do it through legal channels, plenty of people will keep looking for alternatives — whether that’s prediction markets, offshore sportsbooks, or some random bookie that thinks it’s worth the risk.