Fillippos Liakounakos caught scamming again -- this time he's in jail
Fillippos Liakounakos is a young poker pro, known to some as the "little Greak freak". He isn't all that well known in poker, but plays high stakes PLO, and befriended a number of high stakes, Vegas-area pros. He is only 23 years old.
In May 2020, former Victory Poker CEO Dan Fleyshman (who has his own questionable history) called out Fillippos on Twitter, claiming that the young Greek had scammed fellow young poker pro Cord Garcia out of $600k.
I met Garcia in 2018 at a WSOP $1500 event. He seemed like a nice kid, and his playstyle was what you'd expect of an aggressive young poker pro. Garcia previously won the WSOP Colossus event in 2015. After Fleyshman outed Fillippos, he privately begged for the tweet to be deleted, and promised he would pay Garcia back. Supposedly he quickly did so, and Fleyshman kept his promise.
However, Garcia himself ran into his own controversy a few months later. In September 2020, Sorel Mizzi, yet another guy with a problematic past, called out Cord Garcia for ripping him off for $27k. While Mizzi isn't exactly a reliable source, he posted a mountain of text messages which seemed to implicate Garcia in the situation. How could Garcia have been so hard up for $27k after getting $600k back a few months earlier -- money he never thought he'd ever see? No idea, but rumor on the street is that Garcia plays way too big and has poor bankroll management skills, which of course is common among young poker pros.
Confused yet? Let's get back to Fillippos Liakounakos. Do you wonder how Fillippos came up with that $600k to pay back Cord so quickly? Perhaps by scamming someone else?
Looks like that's a pretty good guess.
Fillippos Liakounakos has been arrested for a $500k bitcoin scam, which took place sometime in 2020. It was just reported in the Las Vegas Review Journal: https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/...rader-2553242/
https://www.reviewjournal.com/wp-con...001.jpg?crop=1
Fillippos allegedly impersonalted someone else on the messaging app Telegram, and tricked someone into "selling" $500,000 in bitcoin for 10% markup. The victim was supposed to receive $550k cash from the person he thought he was talking to, who was a trusted business associate. Turned out it was allegedly Fillippos, who simply took the $500k in bitcoin, and then engaged in various complex transactions to transfer it around the blockchain in order to hide where it was ultimately landing.
It is not clear when all of this happened, but in November 2020, the victim reported it to the IC3.org internet crime reporting site, and an investigation was started. However, greed got the better of the perpetrator, who contacted the victim again under yet another fake identity, asking to do a bitcoin sales transaction for just short of a million dollars. This time the victim, under guidance from law enforcement, was able to trick the perpetrator into providing an e-mail address. That was traced back to Fillippos, and here we are.
And so likely ends the high stakes poker career of young Fillippos Liakounakos, who I'm guessing probably scammed a lot more people than Cord Garcia and this other victim.
