Online poker scandals of the past decade: Introduction

The first hand of online poker was dealt by Planet Poker in January of 1998, and since that fateful hand millions of poker players around the globe, and hundreds of online poker sites have become part of the early history of online poker. Unfortunately, online poker’s history is riddled with individual cheaters, angle-shooters, and collusion teams, not to mention the scandals and rumors of malfeasance by the poker sites themselves. The first major online poker scandal occurred in 2001 when the Dutch Boyd run PokerSpot abruptly shut-down owing players some $400,000, and numerous problems are still occurring a decade later..

In this series my goal is to paint a clear picture of the state of online poker by detailing the methods employed by individuals as well as the legitimate scandals that have taken place over the years. I will ignore the rumors and allegations that remain unproven -such as Juiced Flops and Cash-out Curses-and focus on the hard evidence.

Hopefully I will not only enlighten you as to precisely what happened in each situation, but I am also hoping to  bring to light fail-safes that can be implemented to help prevent this type of behavior from occurring in the future.

Below are the topics I will be discussing:

• 1. Multi-Accounting then and now part 1
• 2. Multi-Accounting then and now part 2
• 3. StoxTrader possible soft-collusion
• 4. Brian Townsend Data-mines Isildur1
• 5. Poker Forum scams part 1
• 6. Poker Forum scams more part 2
• 7. Chinese collusion team
• 8. Poker Bots win $58,000
• 9. Super-User Scandals at UB
• 10. Super-User Scandal at Absolute Poker
• 11. PTR cracks Cake and UB security
• 12. PokerSpot and Pitbull Poker close doors
• 13. Jason Ho a case of Misrepresentation

Obviously some of these scandals are much more severe than others, but if you were a victim of one of the lesser violations I doubt you would feel that way. Regardless of the severity, or the amount of money involved, when all is said and done each of these incidents was designed to part people from their money through what could at best termed a dishonest manner, and at worse downright criminal activity.