I dont think this apology is worth sh*t... way to go to blame it on an imaginary friend..

what I want to know though:

1) Did girah do this sort of thing under other names while building up his roll? Has he coached anyone else out there and sweated anybody ever?

2) how prevalent is it in HSNL/MSNL for players to be sweated by their coaches playing HU... anyone who's been sweated by a coach and lost should review their sessions basically.. this is scary

3) jungleman should come under investigation. there's just no way that he didn't know what girah was up to before deciding to move to Portugal to live with him playing poker. there's just no way in hell girah would have entertained this idea while still scamming his friends because what, he's gonna now tell jungleman to get out of the house so he can sweat and scam somebody in hsnl for an hour and then allow jungleman back in the house? there's just no way.

sauron1989's IP needs to be examined, and if proxy/VPN was used, investigation to get to the bottom of where login came from. girah's account transfer history needs to be examined. I believe the real story is a lot wider than just a couple of guys getting scammed.... this is disgusting. in real life if you stole in a deliberate scheme like this from a business you aren't going to be a free man... maybe we do need the government to come in to ensure that players who cheat are LOCKED UP instead of being allowed to still play online or compete in live tournaments like Sorel Mizzi or justin bonomo or girah after issuing some BS apology. In poker the penalties for cheating are just wayyyyy tooo light while the rewards if not caught very high. That's essentially why so many have tried to cheat. I mean, where's the public outcry over Antonius after it's been revealed that he had 40 accounts!?!? In the long run if these people arent punished the game and the industry will suffer... more than just actual victims of cheating.

Seems like he only confessed and made things right when there was pressure applied to him by the parties that had been scammed. If nobody was wiser, I wonder how much longer this scam may have continued for.

The apology also comes off as being a bit insincere imo. Blaming the cheating on a "friend" and then trying to play off the sympathy of others by bringing your mom into it and her being ashamed of you. At least step up and take full account for your horrible actions. As others have said, you are the Portuguese Russ Hamilton but possibly even worse...

+1, this isn't "a mistake", it goes far beyond that. I really doubt this is the first time as well. Who makes over a million at poker and then randomly decides to scam people at 10/20-25/50.

His history needs to be checked very closely and it also needs to be verified that this friend even exists.

Had no idea i was posting in NVG, anyway this is what i said:

This is clearly not enough. I am friends with Haseeb in person, and for the most part respect him quite a lot. Any, and every dollar you've made by being Jose (the thief)'s agent or in any possible way related to him, needs to be donated to a charity many of us agree upon, or back to the victims.

This in itself is ****ing horrid because of how it reflects on others. Less people are respected/trusted as a whole because of this ******ed kid absolutely stealing money from people while being well-regarded and afaik vouched by dogishead. Also, he isn't even banned from 2p2 yet, wtf? I know that people I interact with in the future are going to trust me less/look down on me because of this exact situation. He needs to be banned, dogishead/jungleman/anyone vouching or standing up for this guy need to thoroughly respond, give back any money they've made directly/indirectly from this, and release public apologies on their twitters, blogs, etc accepting they were touting the name of a legitimate thief.

I am a good friend of dogishead and his 2 sentence response absolutely baffles me. People are not treating this nearly as severe as it is. This is no different from him breaking in your house and stealing a large amount of valuables. I honestly hope he goes to some Portugese prison wherever he lives. If anyone knows the law there, please PM me and we can all go about doing whatever is possible to follow through and make sure we can do as much as we can. I am good friends with several high profile lawyers here, and I don't mind paying for whatever it takes for him to be punished.

I also am good friends with people who have interviewed him and helped put his name out there, which indirectly made him more trustworthy to people he stole and cheated from. By Monday, I will make sure his videos are deleted from those sites and there is a public apology from those sites for going about promoting him.

....
Also, the way people are accepting his apology/30k back per victim, is amazing. Do you guys not realize how likely it is that this has gone down way more than just now? With this combined with the fact that I seem like the only one out for some blood makes me lose faith in the poker community as whole

Fwiw, if I were dogishead/jungleman I would be going bananas right now, not releasing 25 word statements about not expecting the guy dog was representing(and making money off of being an agent for) to be a thief and deciding him and jungleman wouldn't move in with him anymore.

^ +1000000

Absolutely people are letting Haseeb and Dan Cates off way too easily now... I mean, those who trusted girah enough to share strategy and eventually be sweated by him probably were in some small way influenced by nosebleeds players like Haseeb and jungleman vouching for this kid to begin with... and that alone implicates them before we even look at how much $$$ they've made directly/indirectly..

Also, we need to be assured that there wasn't something else going on that could've been far worse... given that jungleman and dogishead were moving to live with girah some KID that they hadn't even met(that in itself is very strange..) that if this hadn't been discovered, that potentially girah could've been sweating someone in a week playing HU against an unknown that was under the control of jungleman... nothing in poker surprises me anymore.

As for girah, your story was too good to be true, I thought you were brilliant at poker strategy but this has turned out to be one of the most disgusting stories ive ever heard in poker. You practically used the 2p2 forum, this website and all the members to popularize yourself in order to steal... and that is truly disgusting and worse than someone sitting in the basement by himself multiaccounting(which is bad enough).

This.

Anyone who played the kid 'prodigy' during the lock challenge and sauron on ipoker must agree that this person is not a world beater. Hate to suggest things without proof but i wonder if the skype strat convos were as authentic as seemed?!

I just think that the moral panic displayed, especially from poster tommyhawkers ITT, is silly.

If you're in a position where you have money you need to always be paranoid and take precautions. That comes with the ability of accumulating money long term. There are some standards and those standards needs to be followed. It doesn't matter how good friend someone is, you never show or talk about certain things.

Trust yourself and protect yourself as well as you can. Noone is allowed into the most inner of rings.

Staking requires extreme amounts of trust. Personally I would never consider staking anyone. Taking someone for their word when it comes to money is ******ed. Everything needs to be written and confirmed.

It's like when you flip with a random person, it's the equivalent of accepting candy from strangers in my book.
--------------

And the point I was raising in the first place is this:
It doesn't matter because the people who gets scammed are fish from a certain aspect. They learn not be fish the hard way. The more scams, the more people start protecting themselves. And then better scams will be created.

It all follows the same pattern of equilibrium and demand and supply, where raising the base of knowledge/awareness is primary, hitting or making deals with large networks of scammers secondary and then tertiary just letting survival of the fittest rule amongst the scammers themselves.

Some players reacted against Girah right off the bat, thinking it was some sort of scam by dogishead/jungleman12. They just smelled something fishy with the situation. If anything interesting comes from this situation, I'd dwelve into why you had several posters raising questions of suspicion when Girah first appeared.

-

The whole Portugese poker prodigy thing was pretty obviously horse**** from the start, anyone with the slightest bit of cynicism/not completely naive could tell that. Imo the most important issues yet to be uncovered is: what exactly are the true roles of the other well known players in his story?

Basically wtf was this whole thing really about from the start.

**Paging Noah**

I dont think the story was all horse****. The advice he gave in hist posts was actually pretty good. And he was obviously a good player. Pretty shocking to see this. And i wonder what else is going on. I mean you dont ruin being sponsorsed and a good rep for 30k$?

Ok, HS players. Here's the question: How is it ethical for you to ghost one another and get advise against unsuspecting player during HU sessions?

How is it so standard that OP doesn't even try to disguise the fact? This means it's clearly prevalent behavior in the HS community.

How dare you complain about getting scammed when you yourselves spend your time cheating against people online? Ever think about that?

unless out of the $2M he made under his accounts, a large % had gone to his "backers" from his own play and also belonged to the backers when they logged in and played under his name.... therefore his real roll might be a lottttt less than people thought, and $30k therefore is a nice chunk of change.. for eg to any msnl grinder. and had he not been discovered this could've turned into $120k very easily, of which he would've pocketed 100%, as opposed to let's say 60% of it going to jungleman and dogishead.

^^^This. Should OP be iPoker banned too???

Don't forget ImFromSweden and TooCuriousso1 (cheaters, ghosting).

How are they getting away with this completely unscathed? What, so just because what Girah did was a more blatant form of cheating, these guys are going to get away with cheating?

Make no mistake, this is 100% cheating.

This is disgraceful. I echo the words of all who have said that this should not be tolerated and no matter what Jose claims to be willing to pay back that there is no coming back from doing something like this. He should be barred from the community and an example needs to be made for anyone thinking about doing anything like this in the future.

omg if i hadnt just read this in NVG i wouldnt belive it

It would appear that the confession isn't to be taken at face value, just received this PM (maxkatz1 is a real ipoker player):

Hey,

I'm maxkatz1 on ipoker and read the whole story today. Basically I had done some investigating after loosing to sauon1989 and Jose sweating me 3days in a row and was gonna post sth similiar. He also said sth about a nick on ongame and i kinda suspect its also one of his scam accounts.

.

un****ingbelievable!

I was gonna post this today... Jose scammed me for atleast 15k on ipoker.

On 28th of June I contacted Yoan Gaidov from hand4hand.net about coaching with Jose Maria Machedo, the so called portuguese poker prodigy. He gave me his Skype info and I added him. He said that he would talk with Jose and forward my information to him. He told me there was a waiting list of like 50 players.
On 29th of June he gave me Joses Skype info and I added him. From that day I would try to contact Jose about coaching. He would ignore me first but then after like 2 weeks we finally scheduled a session. I filled out his questionnaire and was good to go. He wouldnt show up to the first session and also missed the 2nd one we scheduled making up excuses. Then he apologized and said he would make it up by coaching me for free for 2 sessions.
On 07/17 we had finally our first session where we talked about some theory. The session was nothing special and I didn,t get the impression that he is as awesome as everyone seems to think he is. He basically send me the links to the hands he posted on 2p2 (also the hands he made his first video for pokerstrategy) and talked about them. He told me to prepare some conceptual hands and send me to him. I would do that but he never really analyzed them. He would then ignore me again for some days and when our next session was due he delayed it during to having so much stress because of his first video being released.
At this time I was playing almost only on pokerstars and partypoker. On 07/28 I would started playing on ipoker on my old account (maxkatz1) I haven't played there for a while. Jose knew my name there since he asked me on 07/17 about it and. All of a sudden Jose started to show an unreal amount of interest to sweating me. After bascially ignoring me for over 3 weeks and hardly doing anything that can be considered coaching he would suggest to sweat me up to 3-4 times a day starting on 07/31. I played up to 9 tables of 6 max on ipoker.

Basically he wanted me to play ongame or ipoker during our sweatsessions. He told me his nick on ipoker is toshisan. Pretty strange if you look it up on ptr - plays low - midstakes hu.
He told me that his ongame account was frozen and that he thinks that games on ongame are great so I should play there and asked me about what my nick there is.
Ok so now the fun part begins. After starting the sweatsession a guy named sauron1989 would sit with me at every table he could at 10-20. He would make some garbage plays (coldcall crap pf v me - make some stupid bluff) then type that he is tilted in chat and ask me to move up in stakes).
Jose told me that he played him for over 3k hands and that he thinks that sauron is a huge fish. He told me he lost like 15k to him at 25-50 but will play him again since hes got really good reads on him. He also encouraged me to start 10-20 games with sauron. I lost about 15 k to sauron on the 3 days where Jose did sweat me.
He would spazz here and there but other than that he was playing in god mode - calling every single bluff of mine. Jose tried to encourage me to play sauron hu and also asked why I won't play him at 25-50.
After sking him several times he finally agreed that I can sweat him and he played about 45 minutes on merge on his girah account. Before and after the session he was asking me again and again if he can sweat me. He was never really interested in analyzing any hands. I got suspicious after getting crushed by sauron 3 days in a row and asked a friend of mine (mdma) about his opinion. He told me that he has read some interesting stuff on a swedish pokerforum a while ago. Basically Jose asked an ipoker reg to sweat him when he played a fish hu. During that session he lost 8 buins or so on on 10-20. Guess to whom he lost? Sauron 1989!
Toshisan has not a single hand played v Sauron1989 according to ptr. Jose asked me to play Sauron from my account since hes getting no action from him. He asked me if he can sit in 4 handed with Sauron1989, me and geeforce1. I said sure but he wouldn't. Then telling me that his ipoker account is blocked cause Hasseeb logged in.
So it all looks pretty strange. First he ignores me and doesn't wann do any coaching. As soon as he sees me playing on ipoker he can't get enough of sweating me. As soon as I sit at ipoker Sauron sits at very table of mine at 10-20 with position and plays in godmode. His ongame account is blocked. His ipoker account is blocked. His moneybookers deposit limit is reached so he cant make a new account and deposit.

I've just spoken with ilrg and what hes writing seems to be true as well, unfortunately.

+1

[01.08.2011 21:47:13] josé maria macedo: ifonlyouknew guy is -19bb loser on ongame and -100k loser on ipoker if its the same guy

so basically hes advertising to play this guy on ongame like he did with sauron on ipoker - if anyone was sweated by him v this guy please post - I lost 3,5 k to him durings the sweat with Jose.

+1

"Im young, I made a mistake and I hope that this doesn't define me"

This is absolutely ridicolous. This is not making a mistake, this is the exact same as stealing. And against friends that trusted hiim. I really am shocked.