“Poker site cheating plot a high-stakes whodunit”
Posted on September 24, 2008
Filed Under General
I remember over five years ago having the "online cheating" argument with my poker buddies. They would argue that the online sites would not cheat for "a couple of extra bucks" when they were already making millions on the rake. I would argue that money is money and since cheating was so easy from inside the server firewall that it just had to be happening. We had this same argument every time we got together on one of our poker road trip. Guess what! They don't argue with me any more. Not after both Ultimate Bet and Absolute were caught cheating.
Now to be fair, some of the details of both of these scandals are still unclear but the bottom line is not. Cut away all the accusations and finger pointing and you have the unrefuted fact that insiders with "super user" accounts were able to see the hole cards of other players and they cheated them out of millions of dollars. No one, any longer, denies this happened.
Did either site try to cover up the facts? Was it the 'previous owners' committing these crimes? Is there any jurisdictional basis for anyone to go to jail? Was any of the cheating erased from the databases? Who ultimately is responsible?
If you would like to know just how convoluted this mess really is... I want to point you to the MSNBC article from last week: Poker site cheating plot a high-stakes whodunit. For the first time in the "non-poker media" there is an honest treatment of just what may have happened in this case. The article ought to convince you not only of what did happen but of how legally difficult it might be to hold anyone accountable for the fraud and theft.

