Online Poker Players Find Cheaters (Part I of III)

December 7, 2008

You would think that if you were worried about online gambling that you would assuage your fears with the idea that the online casinos are on top of ensuring a safe and fair system of playing at their sites. However, it would seem that this is not necessarily the case. It seems that if you are caught cheating in the world of online poker that you can pretty much get away with it as there is no way of enforcing laws to prosecute them.

However, a group of online poker players stepped forward and took matters into their own hands as they discovered that a small group of people had managed to steal more than $20 million from other players. While assuming that it would have been the online casinos that discovered the problem, it wasn’t, it was the online poker players themselves. They used the internet to figure out what was going on and then they worked on how to take them down.

A new joint investigation between 60 Minutes and the Washington Post has revealed that if it weren’t for this group of poker players, not only would they and others get away with stealing from the players, but they would do it for as long as they chose to with no repercussions in site. The problem is that online poker falls outside US law, and is complete unregulated.

The group says that it started simply with a thought that perhaps the games were not as regulated as they seemed. One of them was playing in a high stakes game of poker on Absolute Poker. Someone playing seemed like an amateur the way they were playing, making terrible choices about the hands they had, etc., but they were winning. Other poker players started noticing as well, as this player consistently kept winning both there and at their sister site Ultimate Bet.

Next time: Next Steps