Shameful Online Poker Scam

Alarming reports have been received that an estimated $20million has been cheated from players of two online Poker websites, namely UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker over a period of 4 years. It has been alleged that one of those responsible for this poker scam is in fact a previous world champion poker player and although the name of this person is well known in industry circles, the person or persons concerned have never been officially charged with any poker scam offences and effectively have been allowed to walk away from the scandal scot-free. This shocking situation would not occur in traditional brick and mortar casinos but because of the nature of online poker some of the websites are multi-layered with accountability difficult to ascertain, and located in countries where no form of control is exerted by the authorities. The location of UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker is a shopping mall on an Indian Reservation in Costa Rica which is licensed by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, issued to the Mohawk Tribe and registered in Canada as Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG.

The scandal centres around the ability of certain players to utilise a so-called ‘superuser’ account which allegedly provided access to the cards of other online poker players and subsequently gave these ‘players’ an unfair advantage in a game of online poker. Although complaints were made to the poker websites concerned the alleged poker scam was not taken seriously and so the poker players themselves played detective to try to bring the scam to light. Their determination eventually paid off in the end when UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker finally admitted that their websites had suffered from a serious security breach which though short had been resolved.

Though this online poker scam has been effectively put to rest with UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker being forced as a damage limitation exercise to refund thousands of dollars to disgruntled online poker payers and have been fined $1.5million, the question still remains how was this poker scam ever allowed to occur? Certainly it is in the power of all online poker players themselves to ensure that sites where they are playing online poker are legitimate and above board. Wherever possible to make sure (and certainly if you are investing many thousands of pounds to play poker online) that the website concerned is reputable, also if a player is winning continuously in a big poker game that you have never heard of before, then alarm bells should start ringing and finally to be selective - after all you will most certainly run out of money before you run out of poker websites to play.