Poker Fraudster Arrested for Paying Bodyguard to Kill Former Employee

10:41
27 Jul

A poker fraudster has been arrested for trying to organise the murder of a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who was making a movie that exposed his life as a conman. Fereidoun Khalilian, known as Prince Fred, is accused of paying his former bodyguard $20,000 to kill the producer.

The movie producer, known as “Victim One” in the court documents, was said to have spent the last four years working on a project that exposed Khalilian rather than glorified his life. He was portrayed as an unscrupulous conman who was playing the role of a rich Middle Eastern royal family member.

The bodyguard, known only as Michael, staged the murder, even going as far as producing mock photos of the crime scene to convince Khalilian that the job had been done. A phone call was later recorded by the FBI in which Khalilian incriminated himself by asking if the body had been placed so nobody would ever find it.

Khalilian was arrested and charged with “murder for hire.” He was also denied bail for obvious reasons, and is expected to face a jury trial in September.

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Fereidoun Khalilian the Scammer

Fereidoun Khalilian has had quite a career as a fraudster but he really excelled himself when getting into the poker software business.

The Daily Mail reported:

“According to court records the 51-year-old swindler has lived in Miami since 1989, and since then appeared on the radar of the Federal Trade Commission on a number of occasions for his involvement in various fraudulent schemes.
In one recent alleged fraud, he was accused of selling online gambling software to a Native American tribe in Oklahoma for $9million. After the software appeared to be dysfunctional, the tribe asked for their money back but were refused.
In the early 2000s he was banned from all travel-related telemarketing, and ordered to pay $185,000 to consumers after making fraudulent pitches for travel packages.”

The online gambling software episode cost the Cheyenne and Arapahos Tribe of Oklahoma a small fortune for what was described as 90s era graphics and a website called Pokertribes.com that didn’t even function properly.

Incredibly, Khalilian then managed to snare the Iowa Tribe, also of Oklahoma for exactly the same project but called Pokertribe.com. After some thought, the Iowa Tribe pressed on, hoping to capitalise on the Native American theme and Greysnow.com was launched but it only lasted a couple of years in what we know to be a highly competitive industry.

And so, Khalilian was said to have walked away with almost $20 million in his pocket for handing over nothing of any value. Incredible.