Tag: cheating

New Online Poker Cheating Scandal Discovered

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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.

Lock Poker Drops Poker Cheat

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After Portuguese poker pro José “Girah” Macedo admitted to what amounted to $30,000 poker cheating scam, Lock Poker did the only thing it could do in good consciense–drop Macedo from its esteemed list of sponsored poker pros.

18-year-old Jose Macedo came into the public eye back in March of 2011 when he posted on an online poker forum that he had won $2 million with only a $30 deposit at a poker site (not Lock Poker). He posted the results of how he accomplished that achievement along with a detailed blow-by-blow of how it came to pass. This was followed shortly thereafter by a sponsorship arrangement with Lock Poker.

Macedo then used his newly won status to scam players who trusted him out of $30,000. It went like this: Macedo courted players on a Skype discussion group, telling them he’d sit on the rails while they played in order to give them advice. Well it seems Macedo was advising his players to pit themselves repeatedly against a player by the username Sauron1989 who turned out to be luckier (or simply better) than Macedo had judged him to be. At this point it should come as no surprise that Sauron1989 was Macedo himself, making his moves based on his knowledge of the hole cards in his opponents’ hands.

Lock Poker’s administration made a statement that they were “horrified” by Macedo’s actions and that “within 10 minutes” of learning of his behavior had dropped his LockPRO sponsorship. Macedo is also banned from playing at Lock Poker ever again, under any username.

Lock Poker is one of the last remaining poker sites still serving U.S. players. As such it also currently boasts one of the largest American player pools in all of online poker.