According to Global Poker Index CEO Alex Dreyfus, The Hendon Mob, the worlds largest live poker database is planning to take legal steps against the Ministry of Finance in Poland for violating the site’s terms and conditions and trying to steal data from the website.
Dreyfus gave the following details to PokerNews:
"Since December 29, we have seen a bot coming from the servers of mf.gov.pl that is crawling the whole website. We have tried to fight it, and we blocked it."
When the security team decided to trick the bot by feeding it fake data, the Ministry reportedly changed the bot’s Internet provider several times.
"They have changed the bot’s Internet provider four times already. Our security team has noticed it from day one and, as we have a special tool that allows us to avoid automated bots to steal our data, we fed them with fake data and fake results for over eight days."
Dreyfus claims that the Finance Ministry breached the site’s terms and conditions and tried to steal their Intellectual Property. Besides the Terms and Conditions, the following box is visible on every page of the site.
Dreyfus says they have already contacted a Polish lawyer who has "issued them a warning and sent them a legal letter".
Poland’s Deputy Finance Minister said that he did not know about the issue because he is on vacation, but that he believes that Dreyfus’s claims are "a provocation" and that Dreyfus should continue the case if he believes that there is one.
Dreyfus is not one to shy away from confrontation, and considering the fact that in previous years in most legal cases like this the database owners were the winners this doesn’t come as a surprise.
