Online Poker Scam

February 25, 2009

Whenever someone sits down to play a game of poker, whether it is online or land based, there is always the fear – no matter how slight it is – that someone at the table may have found a way to cheat. However, they are usually able to push that fear aside and concentrate on the task at hand – winning the poker hand. But according to authorities, that fear is not always unfounded.

Authorities say that both United States and Canadian casinos were the victims of a massive poker scam perpetrated by not just one person, but many. Tai Khiem Tran is only the latest to plead guilty to poker cheating, and twenty six others have already done so.

According to authorities, more than $1 million was won from the casinos in the scam, with one location giving almost $900,000 of that. But it wasn’t just customers cheating at poker, they had dealers and supervisors also in on the scam as they used different shuffling techniques in order to let the players know which cards were coming.

Authorities were brought in only after the casinos finally started catching on to what they were doing. But that is just part of it, for it turns out that there were others sitting at other poker tables using signaling devices so that they could communicate with each other. That and they used special software to determine card order. California was one of the places hardest hit by the poker scammers, and they ran their operation from 2002 to 2005.