How Online Gamblers Cheated
Originally published at Kyle Boddy dot com. You can comment here or there.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/25/60minutes/main4633254.shtml
60 Minutes did a story on the Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet scandals from a year ago as originally broke by members of the 2+2 forums and Todd Witteles (Dan Druff). It’s mostly fair and a pretty short watch (available at the link above) at 13 minutes.
These people were only caught because they were reckless and stupid. It is entirely possible that this is happening with other accounts on other sites (or the same ones!) being run by less greedy and more intelligent individuals. Datamining and analyzing millions of hands like I did at PokerStars does limit blatant and even well-thought out cheating, but it is really a simple task to an intelligent insider to figure out how to circumvent these policies. The toughest part is bribing an insider or getting that information, but once it is discovered, it would be easy to exploit this without being caught for a long, long time.
It is worth noting that the people caught in this scandal were not brought to justice, and in the case of Absolute Poker, remained totally anonymous. Online poker is explicitly illegal in 13 states and possibly illegal in the rest of them depending on the interpretation of the Wire Act, and because of this, servers and companies are located offshore and do not answer to U.S. laws or regulation. While it is true that many of these sites are trustworthy and do their best to ensure game integrity, most are not. As always, when you criminalize something, it just goes underground and thrives as a black market if the demand is there.