I suspect Pitbull Poker has superusers! - Page 109 - Internet Poker

SirBonoCTS · 10-01-2009, 11:29 AM

http://www.gambling911.com/gambling-...ed-100109.html

Pitbull Poker Owners Arrested

If you have been following Gambling911.com over the last 24 hours, you would know that the online poker room Pitbull Poker had shut its doors with what appears to be zero intention of paying either customers or players.

Over the summer, many in the online poker community suspected Pitbull of engaging in "cheating" schemes, accusations the ownership flatly denied.

But a review of who was behind Pitbull seemed to suggest something wasn't quite right with the organization.

In 2000, Federico Schiavio, a high level IT employee of Binions, registered the domain wsop.com and began developing custom poker software to launch a poker site on this domain  March 23, 2004 Harrahs takes legal action against Mr. Schiavio over the wsop.com domain  April 19, 2004 Dimensus Ltd, the parent company of Pitbull Poker is formed.  WSOP.com under Mr. Shiavio announces an arrangement with pitbull poker and launches the software.  A scam artist named Kevin Baronowsky gets involved.  He is the registrant of the following domains: o pherx.com a pherehormone selling site o pitbullpokr.com(no typo) which redirects to pitbullpoker.com o xardplayer.com(no typo) also redirects to pitbullpoker.com o All of these sites are found on the same servers.  dsscanuck is a screen name it appears he used on a forum that discusses illegally accessing satellite television. In a discussion on that forum it seems that he was busted by a government agency for selling illegal equipment and turned informant against his customers.  dsscanuck.com is now a blank website that holds banners for pherx.com and eczemaderm.com.  eczemaderm.com is a site that sells a steroid cream product and happens to be hosted on the pherx.com servers.

According to this Bluff Latino America piece, now former employees of Pitbull Gaming claim Pitbull Poker's owners decided to tell the night shift that they were going to make maintenance to the building. The night shift crew were suspicious about this and decided to stay to see what was really going to happen. The employees saw how a truck started gathering all the office equipment. This is the moment when employees went to the police and explained the situation and went back with the police in order to stop the process. Apparently, there are some arrests and right now the employees are in court explaining the situation to the authorities, to explain that the owners are "flight risk" and should not be allowed out of Costa Rica.

Costa Rican online gambling employees, among the best paid in the country, have witnessed similar situations in the past.

In July of 2006, following the arrest of BetonSports then CEO David Carruthers, that behemoth online sports betting operation shut its doors leaving close to 1500 employees out of work and unpaid.

Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher

Apari · 10-01-2009, 11:31 AM

Hopefully one of the other skins buys pitbull out and lets the player founds be available again, only way for this network to restore there reputation.

5dimes has a good name in sportbetting and should do the right thing here.

tk1133 · 10-01-2009, 12:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by iwiniwin

Hello, This is my first post here and i am only posting this because of this recent situations. I have played at PB under the user name iwiniwin for more than a year now and have been very profitable.

However all of my winnings are from tournaments i constantly place in tournaments as well as a few regulars cywest, vicadeboss, BigHouse etc. We all have made a nice living just from the tournaments there being very lite.

The cash games there have been rigged for years it is very easy to tell, anyone who plays in them can easily tell after awhile. I personally have been scammed out of 1000s from them.

I have been a regular tournament player there and cashed out quite a lot. The superusers tend to stick to cash tables and only ever come in the higher tournaments (1k GTD etc) but they usually get slapped around and lose against the regulars ALL IN playing style.

The regular tournament players stay away from cash (most of the time) and know who to avoid.

Here is a small list of players i suspect of cheating. I could be wrong on some of these:
TheRigg
DONTTILTBOI
PAPER_CHASE
PHONIXX
Red_Viper
asos, asoz, azoz
yory
bc91 < all the bc92827 bc5567 so many different ones cant remember all the names
555callme
Yantastic
PokerKillsPeople

These people are usually in the higher stacks cash and are at numerous tables at once. Some names might not be spelt correctly and i do know more i just cant remember what there called. The site gets a lot of players that come in win a lot in cash and then you never see again.

If any of the old regulars would like to contact me just send me a PM here, i allready have most of your emails still. I still have about 1k at PB so if anyone knows how to get that back please contact me.

Thanks iwiniwin

Thanks for being so quick to inform the community...you saved us all money...

Ratatosk · 10-01-2009, 12:19 PM

Hi IwinIwin!
I have played many tournaments against you :-) My username was lotur. I miss pitbull poker because of their tournaments. And yes, the cashtables was horrible.

Verooom · 10-01-2009, 12:21 PM

Pitbull may be down and out but they need to freaking pay the players and employees!!!!

Verooom · 10-01-2009, 12:22 PM

Their casino works fine somehow. You can place wagers.

**augie_** · 10-01-2009, 12:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Verooom

Pitbull may be down and out but they need to freaking pay the players and employees!!!!

what would they gain from doing that?

Verooom · 10-01-2009, 12:24 PM

Obviously you don't have a few thousands stuck in your poker account.

zingbust · 10-01-2009, 12:24 PM

bcloud, in that post you made about the AA vs your Q5 hand, you said ...

Quote:

I'm in the Small Blind, Suspected Cheater (who upon the previous 100 hands had not lost a showdown and had played two or three suspicous hands vs. me) in the BB.

...when you mention that the suspected cheater had not lost a showdown in the previous 100 hands, how many showdowns were there during that 100 hand span where he was involved?

GrindUnumb · 10-01-2009, 12:44 PM

I just got this too. It was text only and nothing like the Bodog emails that are always full of images. This email in the past has gotten Pitbull spam.

Quote:

Originally Posted by spadebidder

I got the email too. This one says it came from Dimensus (PBP).

Code:

Bodog Poker now has the best sign–up poker bonus in its history at 110%! Make any deposit and you’ll immediately receive an up front cash bonus
of 10%. Then hit the tables and for every 10 poker points you earn you’ll receive an additional $1 bonus up to a 100% match of your first deposit (up to a maximum of $500).

Find out more about Bodog Poker's 110% signup bonus.
http://poker.bodog.com/welcome/3118989

Kind Regards,
Brian Black
Player Marketing Director
 
This message was sent by: Dimensus Limited, San Pedro, San Jose, NA NA, Costa Rica

Email Marketing by iContact: http://freetrial.icontact.com

To be removed click here:
http://app.icontact.com/icp/mmail-mp...16612&c=295383

Forward this message: 
http://app.icontact.com/icp/sub/forw...KYN&cid=295383

It was sent through a mass email marketing company using a Bodog return address (marketpoker.com is bodog), but it's pretty obvious that PBP is just using their email list to try to make some extra cash. Someone should tell Bodog who is sending these, they may not appreciate it.

tk1133 · 10-01-2009, 12:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zingbust

bcloud, in that post you made about the AA vs your Q5 hand, you said ...

...when you mention that the suspected cheater had not lost a showdown in the previous 100 hands, how many showdowns were there during that 100 hand span where he was involved?

Ummm, who gives a ****? They were arrested, and their employee's are singing right now to authorities...doesn't matter anymore...it's out of 2+2's hands for now... Start a reality show like Ghost Hunters, but call it Super User Hunters International...get over it

SirBonoCTS · 10-01-2009, 12:46 PM

You guys understand, your $$ is gone, the owners sucked out the bank accounts and the rest will be taken by the processors as recovery for the chargebacks coming.

They don't care about paying customers or employees back. This was a scam from the beginning.

BCloud · 10-01-2009, 12:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zingbust

I have a question for chesterboy, blackcloud, and all others suspected of being the victim of superusers....
Did it seem that the cheaters had superuser powers against all the others at the table, or just you?

Zing, as you could tell looking at my HH, I did a lot of whining i.e. "no way you could call that" etc in the chat windows. You see stuff like this being said in chat in just about every site. But when I played, it was only me whining or chatting. I sometimes would beg others to explain their poker logic to me but 99% of the time they never typed a word.

I remember RockAgua (suspected cheater) once out of the blue asked if I was a professional. That was all he ever said and I played him HU and shorthanded several times.

I do remember once when I accused Phoenixx of cheating at the table, that another player also at the table who I had never seen before spoke up on Phoenixx's behalf (it's in those HH somewhere), basically telling me I was nuts and to STFU. I thought that was odd and after I quit that game, I found later on that that same supporting player and Phoenixx were playing HU at a short-handed table. I thought/think they were waiting for someone to come in so they could collude or whatever.

I also remember playing a 2/5 game at a full table during late night (midnight or so) in which I lost a couple buyins ($800 or so) got upset and closed down the site. After trying to calm down for about 5 minutes I realized I wanted to tilt more away and went back to find an empty table.

Even with all of this, I did not come to this thread and post anything until I was contacted by my Rake supervisor in an email, explaining a possible situation was going on with the site and others were posting here and on their Rake site about possible "Superusing". Until then I knew little to no . If he wouldn't have sent that email, I probably would not be here even now.

To answer your question, yeah, I felt very alone and singled out. I'm just glad I got an email that proved I wasn't alone in my suspicions.

Rapala · 10-01-2009, 12:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zingbust

I have a question for chesterboy, blackcloud, and all others suspected of being the victim of superusers....
Did it seem that the cheaters had superuser powers against all the others at the table, or just you?

In my final session playing there, it was my friend and I playing with the 4 we suspected. (my friend and I play tough against each other before someone implies something..) We looked very very hard for a single hand where they called the river and lost and this didn't happen in 2+ hours. If the suspects ever were in a hand against each other there was a lot of check folding on the flop, didn't see any showdowns there either. We never suspected collusion as pots were very often hu.
I've been playing limit holdem for 4 years, 2 years full time, seen every kind of crazy player type and I've never felt cheated other than this site. In my mind I am 99.999% sure they were superusing. Also just want to mention that my friend and I were both very hesitant about voicing our suspicions to each other. We all know it's pretty embarrassing to join the legions of noobs who have said before 'zomg its rigged'. At first we were just jokingly saying 'lol, its like they can see our cards' with a response of 'yeh and they never landed ont he moon

'.

After a while though we were forced to take it seriously culminating in looking very hard just for evidence of honest play. I've told my story previously in this thread, but there seem to be many doubters surfacing and I just wanted to chime in to back up chester.

Just wanna say well done to Chester for the mountain of work he's put into this and what has been achieved. It's pretty amazing how communication on the internet has the power to shut these scammers down.

My sympathies to the people waiting for cashouts, hopefully the situation will progress to the point where Kevin is legally forced to pay you out. I also hope justice is served and he spends a long time behind bars.

As for Dave, I highly doubt he wasn't involved in what was happening. You just have to see the dodgy way he handled all customer support contact emails and the way he skirted all the important questions in this thread. For such a tiny company, it seems impossible he wouldn't know what was going on.

I would be willing to donate some money to hire a private investigator or something so we can get to the bottom of this fiasco. I hate seeing online poker being given a bad rep and scammers should know they will be held accountable if caught. Seems crazy they might get away with this when it's all but proven there was wrongdoing.

BCloud · 10-01-2009, 12:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zingbust

bcloud, in that post you made about the AA vs your Q5 hand, you said ...

...when you mention that the suspected cheater had not lost a showdown in the previous 100 hands, how many showdowns were there during that 100 hand span where he was involved?

Not many.