As it was popular in the news recently, and as I informed you about, a group of China-based players colluded against players at PokerStars tables. One of the victims of the conspiracy, Tom Broadbent was not happy with his refund, $16,90, he thinks PokerStars owes him much more. He decided to travel to Beijing to report the incident personally to the local police.
The scandal was big news, and PokerStars closed 38 accounts involved in the illegal activities rather quickly, in which the conspirators earned a total of about $494,000 and PokerStars paid $2,100,000 in compensation to the victims. It turned out in Beijing to Mr. Broadbent that Chinese authorities have little power on such cases, hence foreign gangs know they can easily get away with crimes like these.
Such collusion is not very common, but not unprecedented. PokerStars, the largest online poker room have previously refunded $80,000 to players who unwittingly went up against poker "bots" – automated card-playing software programs that were mixed with real-life players at online tables.
The problem is (as former PokerStars employee cited by the BBC says) that preventing collusions is virtually impossible, gaming companies can only discover illegal activities in retrospect, after gamers send them complaints.
Such complaints are very popular, but as it turns out, they are rarely due to collusion, 95% of the players are just frustrated because of their losing spree, and suspect cheating. This is why PokerStars has a hard time investigating all the complaints, but they say the are still pledged to investigate all of them.
PokerStars claims they now have fortified their security system and their proactive anti-collusion softwares, so they consider online play safe now.
Mr. Broadbent, eager to find justice, plans to fly to China again later this year to check the progress made by the local police investigating the PokerStars colluders.
