The modus operandi and warning signs of a poker scammer Part 1

Pretty much anyone who decides to take the game of poker seriously winds up joining a poker forum –when I first started playing rec.gambling.poker was THE place to be, and I was there! Now there are a lot more options with the massive 2+2 leading the way, and a number of smaller, more community-like, forums on virtually every online poker site: 2+2 is the Walmart to the rest of the forums Mom & Pop stores.

Now, there are a lot of good things that come out of poker forums: Strategy talk, friendships, lol’s and doh’s, as well as a ton of poker gossip and news. But for all of the plusses poker forums also come with their fair-share of drawbacks as you have Internet tough guys, trolls, and worst of all scammers using these forums as a hunting ground. This article is about the last of that group, the Internet Poker Forum Scammer and how forum users can help identify them before they strike, and some basic precautions you should use when dealing with anyone on the Internet.

First off, there are certain things you should always do when making any financial deal on the Internet:

• Don’t give out too much information about yourself (screen-names, passwords, etc)
• Do a little research on the person’s reputation before shipping money
• Don’t make a deal that is “too good to be true”
• Don’t ship money to some anonymous screen-name

All of these things will protect from the common Internet thief, but there are plenty of other scammers who go beyond these quick scores and cultivate their reputations over a period of time only to strike when you least expect it –whether premeditated or simply a desperate person doing a desperate thing makes no difference in these cases.

Regardless of how trustworthy you feel someone is, if you really don’t know them, then you really don’t know what is going on in their life, and therefore you don’t know what they are capable of: One of the people I respected the most in the mid-2000’s in the poker world –someone I had phone conversations with, talked with privately, and even had play a tournament I had qualified for that I couldn’t make—turned out to be one of the worst scammers of all time in online poker, stealing five-figures form people that were backing him at neverbeg.com (a now defunct site).

At the time I couldn’t believe it, I actually didn’t believe it, despite the warning signs that were clearly there: The embellished stories, the enviable lifestyle, the periods of Houdini-like disappearances followed by a riveting tale. But this is the mark of any good con-man: misdirection.

In Part 2 of this series I’ll detail several things forum posters should keep their eyes open for when it comes to potential scammers.

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