Was contact made via PM, or was it email?

If email, is that the same address as the sender?

PM.

Sent him an email ~30min ago

I dont understand the whole trading thing....

Is a chat log or a forum post enough to prove the money was not just sent as a gift?, can legal action be taken in situations like this?

Trades occur by agreement between two or more parties. Each party agrees to send something of value and receive something else of acceptable value.
A breakdown occurs when one or more parties do not perform according to their agreement. There are civil and criminal laws that address the breakdown.

In civil law, there is contract law. The aggrieved party can bring action to compel completion of the contract and/or seek other compensation.

In criminal law, there is fraud. Conviction can result in restitution and/or incarceration.

All the legal nuances aside, for either case to succeed, sufficient evidence must be presented which leads to a resonable conclusion that an illegal act occured. One might be permitted to add chat logs, et cetera, to the totality of the evidence, but each case should be considered unique, inasmuch as a judge will decide what is permissible.

At the end of the day couldnt either party just make up chat logs?, or couldnt someone just say that chat logs are fake or that it wasnt them participating in chat.

Is there any case where scams like this have resulted in a criminal conviction or where the law has got involved. Or is the only result having 2plus2 members spamming "Eric Hardt is a scammer"

As far as I know there is no written contract or witnesses in these "trades"?.

Well, it used to be all about the paper trail. Now computers leave us with digital fingerprints, IP addresses, email servers, cellphones that can be tracked through gps, etc. As Clamper said, it's all about the totality of evidence.

Woe be to the party that submits forged evidence.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...victed-338205/

Contracts can be verbal. All it takes is an agreement. Non-public evidence can be obtained via supoena.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract

If someone scams and is stupid enough to use US bank accounts (to either send or receive funds), then it is very plausible to get a judgement or conviction in either civil or criminal court.

However, if a bank account is not used, it is a MUCH steeper uphill battle.

For example, if person A agrees to send funds from one poker site to person B in exchange for funds from a different poker site, and then one party doesn't send, getting a criminal conviction for this would be extremely difficult. Most DAs would not take a case like this. Filing a case in civil court would be possible, but it would also be time consuming and expensive, so unless the amount scammed was significant, for most people, it would not be worth it. That is why trading funds on here is always somewhat risky (although by following the rules and doing your homework you can mitigate some of this risk).

When you bring US bank accounts into the equation, since this constitutes bank fraud, and since fraud is covered by nearly all banks, this is why sending/receiving bank wires is the safest form of paying for poker funds when trading with someone on here.

Interesting info, thanks.

It is probably possible, but it would take both computer specialists with full access to both computers, and a subpoena of the AIM server, and even with all of that, it would be questionable because I have no idea how long chat logs are stored in their servers.

Basically, if police needed to access AIM chat logs for a major investigation (like a murder or a terrorism case), then it would be possible. But for a bunch of poker players, very slim chance.

A printed chat log might sway the preponderance of evidence in a small claims court, but it may also not. Basically, AIM chat logs are pretty weak evidence since they can easily be forged or manipulated.

What are the odds that:
A. Someone had the motivation to hack into all his accounts.
odds against because:
a. He is comparatively a low profile player
b. His lock account is only like 2 months old
c. He never changed his lock passwords after he allegedly figured out he was hacked. There was certainly a small amount of money that could have been [sent back to the victim, and yet the play continued for a week.
B. This alleged hacker, found his/her way to the high stakes trading thread and conducted everything without Hambones knowledge.
C. Hambones lack of communication in the first week of the issue, the most important time to pursue a possible hacker.
D. This hacker would stay on this account and lose it to two regulars, and not lose this money to a different account are slim to none...
(unless those two players are involved in the scam)

I would say that the odds of all his accounts being hacked being 1,000,000 to 1. The odds that he just sits there and lets this hacker play on his account for days on: None. No chance someone sits there and lets someone just play for days on your account unless you have a dormant account. However, hamebone4k had been trading earlier and his account was being used. He also knew that the scam had taken place and before he came back I believe there was money still in the account that was being played with.

I don't even lay that good of odds...as small a non-zero chance as you conceive of. I know why he wasn't around until all the money was gone, it's not hard to figure out.

This is all a show by our resident dirtbag.

The most likely scenario here is that Hambone4k planned on playing with this 8k and send it back to the sender, and keep the profits... Freerolling...
What he didnt plan for was going nearly broke. Now, in the days after the bulk of it was lost, he has been desperately trying to recoup the monies in an attempt to pay back the victim...
He probably thought 8k was enough to cover any swings. oops.

Im very sorry for the victim here and I really hope there is some way to get your money back. As many others have said, its best, when working for the first time with a new trader, to do smaller increments at first until trust is built.

seems reasonable.

I noticed that JoeBanana05 is up over 100k in cash games on merge... However Scobidoo on the other hand only had 4 sessions tracked by PTR... See below.

http://www.pokertableratings.com/mer...earch/Scobidoo

There are actually a lot more sessions (go to sessions link). There are just only 4 different stakes ptr has him tracked for.

I closely reviewed some of the hands I could get off of PTR, hands between smitty1717 vs scobidoo and also vs joebanana05...
It doesnt appear at all to be chip dumping, there were definitely opportunities in hands where it could easily be argued to get the money in bad on smitty1717s part (I'll admit I would think its awful poker, but still not completely unreasonable).
Scobidoo may not have a ton of hands logged and his profit is not much more than 10k, but still I find it hard to believe he would be trying to get chips dumped to him when he 3bet induces a 4bet with 99 and runs into AQ for 4k... seems like someone involved in a 8k theiving scam would not have two bullets of 4k behind to deal with a loss there, would be unwise to just lose all their money in a flip when they would easily just slowplay the hand and lose the minimum...
Hambone why? you had 11k at one point vrs scobidoo, you could easily have just cashed out and sent back the 8k and freerolled on that 3k!!!! not that I condone this action in any way but staying and playing, while I guess it was fun for you feeling like a big shot sittin on 11k, was stupid. You coulda got away with this.
This is clearly a degen gone wild in my informed opinion.

I clicked sessions tab and only found one 424 hand session at 25/50... aM I doing something wrong here

EDIT: You mean Scobidoo? I was searching smitty1717

I can see that Scobidoo has been playing since late January at least... Im obv a noob at searching PTR but it really doesn't look like there was any involvement from the other screennames ITT.

Yeah i meant Scobidoo.

The sick part is he reports that his account was hacked on the 7th of March. Yet he continues to play sit in gos the next day almost a full 24 hours later. He obviously was not hacked and is full of it. He could have had some money to send back if he did not play on the account the next day.

+1

agree, +2 to that

drug money repayaments is my guess

edit: although maybe not due to him not wanting a set amount at the beginning