It seems that poker scandals just seem to continue to come out of the wood works. We had a few live poker cheating stories come out, and there have been many big online poker cheating scandals over past years. This time it was a high stakes player who installed Trojan Horse software on multiple different players’ computers so that he could see their hole cards.
It was a German high stakes poker player named Maximillian Ashkar, who is based out of London currently. He apparently did this to over 12 different players, and won at least $2 million by doing this tactic. The story behind how this played out is a pretty interesting one though, as Ashkar used his friendships with high-stakes players to use their computers and install the virus.
While this went on for a while, two of the players who were involved decided to confront him about the situation. This all happened at the European Poker Championships recently, and Ashkar finally confessed. At this point, the two players called the police, but it took a turn for the worst when Ashkar said that he was coerced by the players, and that he never confessed to anything.
Ashkar’s computers and all of his equipment were seized by the police as they were under the suspicion of fraud, but the two players who confronted him were actually charged in this situation with coercion and deprivation of liberty due to their response to findings.
This story is a very interesting one, as Ashkar was widely known as one of the nicer guys in the poker community. He offered his friends places to stay, and many considered him more likely to be one of the people who could potentially be scammed as he was very trusting; rather than being the one doing any type of scamming. The other two players who were involved in this situation were not known specifically, but it was rumored that one of the players was Ronnie Kaiser, who recently won the European Poker Tour’s Tallinn event.
More news will be released on this as it is reported, but one thing that is certain is that these poker scams seem to be caught faster each time that someone tries them.