Sadly a few bad trip advisor reviews are unlikely to damage the hotels business very much, most of their usual guests won't care about this stuff, they just want to stay in a nice hotel and wont be travelling around with 6 or 7 figures in online poker accounts. The threat here is unique and apply's to high stakes poker players, not the general public.

Those responsible for this are sophisticated criminals IMO and they are either poker players themselves or follow the poker scene closely enough to understand how to take advantage of situations like this where multiple high rollers and online pros are staying in the same place at the same time.

They will:
a) have an understanding of the poker world - knowing to target guys like Ignat & Jeans, probably others as well that are not mentioned in this thread. Liv Boeree was also staying at the Arts along with other high stakes / nosebleed players / most of the high rollers who played in the 50k event. The general public will not know who these guys are.
b) have access to large sums of money if they plan to carry out a super-user / god-mode type scams, they might be connected to some poker player (s) who would also be in on it
c) be technically knowledgeable enough to infect laptops with Trojans / spyware
d) Be connected in some way with the hotel staff or management

This sort of crime can be very lucrative;

If they try to access or infect 10 laptops for example, it only needs to work on 1 or 2 of them to be a multiple 6 figure score for the perpetrator. This is not the sort of thing standard criminals / Catalan pickpockets are capable of carrying out.
It's possible someone in the poker scene is involved.

Thanks for writing out the whole story in so much detail Jeans, sorry to hear this happened to you, I have been following your progress since blogging on coinflip and you always seemed like a decent guy.

Hopefully Pokerstars can help, and lessons for the whole community can be learnt for the future.

The general public won't care about the specifics, they will just know security breach, rooms broken into. It doesn't matter that it is some poker player specific incident.

Wow, sick.
I was the one who found the laptop im quite sure. I forgot the time but i was at the pool and wanted to go to my room and went to the elevators at the 2nd floor when i walked past this little chillout place where i found a heavy and big laptop. I walked back in the direction of the pool and gave the laptop to a girl who works at the Marina.

Also had problems with keys which didnt work and for sure 1 phonecall without talking.

+1. Did OP order room service that day, did a room service employee come in to collect a table from a previous room service order? Was there any reason for room service to be in room? Did they deliver some kind of amenity? Did OP use Mini-Bar? Does this hotel have the automated mini-bar set up like some other Ritz Properties & Vegas properties where they know which mini-bars have been used/need to be re-stocked remotely? It is also worth noting that the maid's keycard is identified with a person's name (as it should be), but we don't see that with room service or mini-bar (often separate hotel depts.) That is a problem & bad practice and a property like this should know better. Do they have cameras on the service elevators & landings that staff move through?

waiting to hear what happens? are you still at barcelona? what do you think will be the likely outcome. From what i read, it really feels like there isnt an urgency by the hotel to resolve it as they feel it will damage its reputation.

In my experience in Barca (merely from vacationing there a lot) is that they have a subculture of pickpockets and scams. I've heard of stories where con artists dress up as fake/undercover policeman to cheat people out of their passports/wallets/money, distracting drivers in cars while looting the trunk, pickpockets that slit your pockets/purse...

I love the city, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if people working at the hotel was in on it. I'd be even more surprised if the police actually did anything to help just because they're pretty goddamn lazy over there in terms of actually doing ANYTHING.

IMO, make a big fuss, rebuy all equipment, and maybe complain enough that PS never sets an event there b/c of how shady this entire situation is.

either way GL and hope everything turns out ok

Doubt this is logistically possible. If they had this kind of space/staff/equipment to implement this wouldn't they have safety deposit boxes on location for chips/cash for players already (I'm assuming they don't, haven't hit an EPT stop in quite some time)? Imagine how much bigger a laptop lockbox would need to be. Would take up a ton of space. I'd also imagine it wouldn't be completely impermeable and may lead players to have a false sense of security and not implement protective measures on their laptop themselves (which would be a bad thing).

Amazing how badly the hotel has handled this

Obv keep us updated Jeans.

The hotel don't care, as mentioned in a previous post this is one of the most Baller hotels in the world, in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, they will get booked up all year round regardless.

+1. some higher ups need to light a fire under the asses of the hotel staff who are in charge of investigating this. this is absolutely goddamn ridiculous.

Insane story guys, glad you caught on before getting hacked.

Does anybody have strong evidence that the hackers were going after specifically poker players and not just people staying at a five star hotel (all of whom might have valuable financial info on their PCs)? After all, this could just be an instance of identity theft as opposed to poker theft.

If there's strong evidence that high stakes poker players are targeted, then combined with the "broken" cameras on Jeans' floor and the flagrantly obstructive staff, and combined with the similar situations at other EPT stops, then imo there's good (circumstantial) reason to believe some organization is targeting high stakes poker players. That would obviously be very scary!

unbelievable. gl op, keep us updated

+1. Post reviews on high quality sites. Start threads in travel forums, get your story out to as many newspapers as possible. Krantz says we need a robocop, but if every person reading this thread wrote a negative review for Arts Barcelona (which should be in all caps in the title, ldo), it'd make a big difference. I would have been so mad I that I'd be on Locked Up.

There is obviously extremely strong circumstantial evidence that it is deliberate targeting.

Also just to repeat: The old head of security guy who can't speak English? He is in on it. This is obvious.

I would hire a lawyer right of the bat and sue the hotel or get professional guidance. PokerStars should also be more involved, these players looks like sitting ducks...

There is absolutely no doubt about it. Can't let those guys get away with a clear Attempt of Fraud (did they even get to cashout/or do anything?)

It really looks to me that the Hotel or some people that are working there are involved in one way or another. Especially the blatant lie about your friend and saying he did it, well thats actually crossing the line. Bigtime.

(You can at least pressure them with a lawsuit with a few letters from an attorney). Which should make The Arts take this case seriously.

Notify the press and post e-mails to leading persons in Ritz Chain should also be done.

for all the players, never book arts again. also, get new laptops if u had a room at arts.

next time, better just leave the laptops at home / come with laptop with no usable data or poker softwares...

just ridiculous **** this ept and security

OMFG!

This is one of the sickest things ive read.

Ive been to so many EPT stops during the years and thats basically the only time I play online from my laptop... Ive lost so much money during those stops playing online thats it was just laughable... And I havent had a password on my laptop, I just closed all my lobbies down when I left.

Not saying anything happend... But I have often wondered how come I allways lost on my laptop, and have had the same one for 4 years prob.

Inb4: Stupid donk with no password on com...

From now on I will never bring my (new or any for that case) laptop to any pokerstop and I might as well boycut all EPT stops just for the reason that stars actions so far have been so bad I cant even find words!

I think poker players were specifically targeted. If they were just looking to swipe info off of a laptop of hotel guests in the very elaborate manner described in the OP they'd likely target guys that look very rich and hopefully aren't very computer savvy. Just my read on the situation.

I don't know what Jeans/Ignat even really look like, but I'd imagine if it was merely an act of targeted identity theft they'd target guys that look more put together than two 20-something online poker superstars.

Of course if they were just randomly breaking into rooms throughout the hotel stealing as much info as possible this wouldn't necessarily be the case, but given the theft described it seems a bit more premeditated than that.

The probability of that old guy, who doesn't speak English, being an idiot by thinking that this is another drunk foreign young rich tourist who's making trouble (nothing got stolen, remember) is WAY higher that the one that ties him to the story as one of the "bad guys".

seems pretty clear they were knowingly going after poker players. without ever dealing with eu banks, i would assume that if they were simply stealing info from wealthy people, bank fraud would be much easier proven/punishable than poker fraud, making it much more likely to be exposed long before now.

for the 2nd point, wouldnt you assume that 20 somethings staying in a fairly expensive hotel are going to have access to money anyway? not like your average college kid is staying in the ritz on every vacation

gl jeans/human. absolutely absurd/scary story

imo if you think about it the chance that these guys were randomly targeted by a goofy identity theft ring (who cops/hotel knew nothing about) is much lower than by a group who realized they could win a huge amount by planting trojans. Also there was a known group that did this back in the day to a bunch of scandi's (theterrorist/terrorofsweden/mohamad kowssarie)

Also to everyone a simple answer to cracking is not useing windows they are as out of it as spain. With the unemployment so high in spain you could tag the central gov, also there aresecurity softwaresyou placeon yourlaptops that will photogragh anyone opening the laptop andsending live feeds of the whole action closeup.. Get open BSD operating system.

Not sure if this has been answered :

Why not hire a lawyer? Few complaints won't do much.

The bad part of all of this is also that these poker players are pretty much alone in this.
Both the Arts hotel and EPT/PokerStars want this thing to go away as quickly and quietly as possible.
Both are more concerned about their reputations and upholding their business, than about the concerns of the people that were (are) being targeted in this thing.
There have been other instances of coordinated hotel room break-ins (Prague comes to mind), where huge sums were stolen. This was quickly blamed on the hotel, and then swept under the rug.
I predict the same will happen here, that PokerStars will try to blame it on hotel security, and will want nothing more to do with the matter. The show must go on!
Upcoming PokerStars statements will be about the main event champion, WCOOP results, and nothing else.
They're just hoping that we will have forgotten all about it before the next event.

So my advice would be to take everything that PokerStars, EPT, or hotel representatives tell you with a grain of salt.
If anything, don't depend on them to help you, because I don't believe they're serving the player's best interests here.
EPT is a huge money making machine, and they definitely don't want another PR hit like Berlin, that would tarnish their reputation.

They definitely don't want this to go public to mainstream press, so that's probably exactly why we should consider doing just that.