Here at Gambling Review, we always urge you to gamble responsibly. I have said more times than I can count that you should never gamble money that you can’t afford to lose. Perhaps I should be more specific. That does not mean you should steal money from other people to gamble with. That’s exactly what a slimeball insurance broker named Daniel Trolaro did, according to authorities.

Trolaro used to work as a insurance broker for Prudential Insurance Company of America. Aside from his day job, he enjoys playing games at online casinos, but figured he would enjoy them a lot more if he could somehow spend someone else’s money instead of his own. The genius then decided to defraud nine of his clients, stealing approximately $1.9 million, and use that money at the online casinos.

A New Jersey grand jury indicted Trolaro on one count of first-degree financial facilitation of criminal activity – in this case, money laundering, eight counts of second-degree theft by failure to make required disposition of property, and two counts of third-degree theft by failure to make required disposition of property.

According to the indictment, Trolaro bilked nine of his clients out of sums ranging from $46,000 to $910,000 from June 2008 until February of this year. At that time, an internal investigation by Prudential uncovered his wrongdoing and Trolaro was fired. Prudential then referred the matter to state authorities. According to a Prudential spokesman, Trolaro “misappropriated multiple clients’ funds withdrawn from their checking accounts, savings accounts, annuity contracts and/or brokerage accounts for his own benefit and borrowed money from several clients without firm approval.”

The good news is that I haven’t heard anyone use the “gambling addiction” excuse yet. “Oh, he has a gambling problem. That’s why he had to steal from his clients!” Though there are people with gambling problems, more often than not it’s simply a convenient excuse. In this case, like in many, greed, stupidity and selfishness seemed to be the largest factors at play – not gambling addiction.

Tags: Daniel Trolaro, Dumb Crook News, fraud, gambling crimes, online casinos, online gambling, problem gambling, Prudential Insurance Company of America, responsible gambling

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.