PokerStars has always been one of the most popular online poker sites out there, and this especially includes among United States players as well. It seems that since Black Friday, many US based players have continued to attempt to find ways to play at the massive site, even though it shut out the United States completely. Some players moved out of country in order to continue their poker careers, but most players who don’t play for a living could not move out of the country to continue playing poker; so they had to turn to other routes. This is where the Virtual Private Networks (VPN) came in.
Unfortunately for US players, the VPN’s may have worked for a while, but PokerStars has began to crack down on this, and have frozen the accounts of many US poker players who have been using the private networks. The players would receive notices stating that their account was suspended “pending further legal review”.
Players can not log in to PokerStars from inside the US borders to play for real money, but with these new connections, their internet connections are then rerouted through different servers that are hosted from outside of the United States. Essentially, it is like tricking the system into saying that the player is actually in a country that allows online poker player, and saying that their IP address is not from the United States.
The main way that these connections have been detected by PokerStars, is that once a player gets disconnected from the VPN, you can see their actual location. And of course PokerStars is one of the most in-depth and largest online poker sites out there, so you can bet that they have tracked this quite a bit.
It will be interesting to see what PokerStars decides to do about the players who have been using these Virtual Private Networks. You can assume that they will almost definitely be taking action against the accounts that have been using them. Part of this reason is due to the fact that PokerStars has been huge in following the Department of Justice’s online poker rules since Black Friday.