For the past year, I've been part of 2 separate groups that have been spending countless hours to detect members of the russian / czech / ukrainian bot-ring and helping sites in detecting and banning the accounts.

While the other sites I play on have been effective in catching and banning these bots, 888 has been as effective in ignoring me regarding the subject.

I'm not going say why I know these guys are using a bot and what are the giveaways, for obvious reasons. Also, I'm still weighing the pros and cons of outing the accounts publicly so if you have an opinion about that, I'm all ears. I've reported them to 888 and I'm hoping this thread would put some pressure on them to act to make the game fair for everyone.

I've tried to contact previous and current employees of 888poker to find someone who would care, before posting on a public forum about it. I never found anyone

I was provided the stats from the "russian PTR" of the 5 accounts in question. One could claim their stats match fairly well to each other.



The two groups were really actively working on getting the bots banned in June on other sites. I reported the 5 accounts to 888 between June 26th and July 1st this year.

Two accounts stop playing around that time and don't come back. Did they get banned or did they get spooked? As the others kept playing, I'm guessing they got spooked. Without 888 releasing any info, we can only guess. Remember, the same bots were getting banned and their funds confiscated on other sites at the same time.

Account 1's PTR session tab today



Account 2's PTR session tab today



Account 3's session tab from my HEM. Seems he stopped playing for a while around the time of my report to 888 but re-appeared early August.



Account 4 and 5 have kept playing the whole time.

The purpose of this thread is to try to get someone from 888poker to care about this problem. The bots have and are still taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the games. They have and are beating SSNL and MSNL with high winrates.

I didn't include anywhere close to all of proof and info about this whole issue as the less information is available online for these bot developers, the better.

After 4-5 emails to 888, this is their answer to each of my email:

Thank you for reading.

Edit:

After discussing the matter with some people, I've decided to out the accounts.

The accounts that stopped playing after my email: VneZakona & lostinchips

Account that stopped playing but came back: breakingtheW

Accounts that have kept playing the whole time: KOKOKKOLO and AnimalFairy

Regarding the last 2, if you check KOKO's history, you will see he wasn't doing that well before July last year. At the same time he stopped playing 100nl and got a hold of the bot, I'm guessing from his results.



The first 4 accounts are russian, AnimalFairy is Czech.

There might be more but these are the ones I've found so far.

So now you should identify each of the 5 accounts from your first post.

And prepare for (and report) any possible changes in style and chat.

Aren't they identified? Just not connected to the stats but I'm not sure what that would do? Maybe I'm missing something

Some of them chat, at least chatted on other sites so that's not proof either way.

Changes in style are expected and they'll probably come back and will be harder to detect in the future. At least we now have groups of people dedicated to busting them so it will be a hard time for anyone run a bot in the future.

Just wanted to post that have a huge respect guys for your hard work and fighting back against bots which as we see is a huge problem. This is probably first time we have at least part of the poker community fighting back.
Unfortunately 888 just proves how sites are uninterested in doing something about it. Hope that shaming them in public will force them to do something about it.

I was suspicious of KOKOKKOLO, he used to be pretty bad than started crushing the last 6 month s

I posted this in another thread earlier regarding this thread.

FYI,
I sent your thread over to support yesterday and they are currently investigating the issues you raised.

888Rep

888 get your game together it is not good enough to let these cheaters continue! If I wanted to play against a machine I would play WPT on xbox! Same russian players, cheating as usual.guys like lessu do all the hard work and found them out and gets 0$$$ I don't see these multi million $ sites fronting up $$$ to stop this either.

It's funny to see how they react against a Botters

Certain group of Russian players have identical stats.
Some of which are particulary weird, for example they have turn aggression 50% after having a huge 70% CBet on the flop, they iso raise a limper from the small blind in over 70% of the time, very weird bet sizeings...
Not even the most aggresive regulars have loose stats like these. It seems pretty impossible to me that they are constantly winning players on a decent sample of hands.
Even though they answer to me in the chat when I write to them, something doesn't seem right here.

I believe 888 tried to destroy these bots and stop them from playing earlier this month and the month before by repeatedly disconnecting their system

mbsfn to load up a bot and then go out for the day while it crushes.

which is funny because if bot overtake the game = poker dead = no more mirrions for them

Two more bots found with matching stats with the help of a 2+2er

Viiolent

Kajizragore

888rep, I'm sure you read this so if you could relay that info to the right people. Thanks.

nice work Lessu

Lessuman Lessuman, kicking bots apart as fast as he can, see's em with, his laser eyes, blowing apart their human disguise, LOOK OUT, here comes the Lessuman.

im pretty sure it doesnt work like this, its more they have a software that tells them what to do at what frequency and they click away/chat so sites cant tell.

also those stats look basically identical to the guys found on stars

Update:

Have been getting some PMs to check possible bot accounts. So far these accounts have been matched to the bot stats and reported to 888.

My initial emails to 888 were sent between June 26th and July 1st
This thread was started Aug 19th
New email including all details sent to 888 Aug 23rd

Suspected bot account (last active according to PTR)
AnimalFairy (Aug 19)
VneZakona (Jun 30)
BreakingtheW (Aug 19)
Lostinchips (Jun 29)
KOKOKKOLO (today, Aug 23)
Viiolent (today, Aug 23)

First time reported today so most likely active lately:
Gansmen
F19117
NailCutcher

http://i.imgur.com/f6HApsr.png



http://i.imgur.com/OfJGPLq.png

you should be paid for your work

they might send you a 25$ casino bonus that you need to wager 30 times in order to be able to withdraw it Kappa

good work

I think 888 server has been attacked by hackers as a revenge for kicking out the bots. Maybe the connection will be fine again if you let them play... just sayin...

What other sites did you find bots on?

The sad thing is we could have equivalent threads for Party, iPoker and Stars. Bots exists on all sites, and the likes of Lessu and Schwein have only discovered a few of them. It's a constant battle.

Roger- Chico network is infested with bots

Well, I originally didn't want to name the sites as it would also acknowledge that they had bots on their site for even 2 years before they banned them and did so only after player reports. I guess in the current environment we should be promoting the sites that are taking this issue seriously and should not try to hide the facts.

Arty, the reason there aren't threads like this for Party and Stars is that they took this issue seriously after they were provided information much like is available in this thread. I don't play on Ipoker so I have no clue what's going on there and how bot infested that network is but if someone wants to start a group to detect and help Ipoker address this problem, I'm willing to help out.

Arty, to add we've not only found few of them. I think Party and Stars both are free of this botring currently and there are several active botbusters working on detecting any new attempts from this group to come back on both the player side and the sites' side.

I'm sure the botring will be back and will be even more difficult to catch next time. That's why it's also important for as many as it's possible to know about this issue and to be on the lookout. The downside is that the more information is available publicly, the easier it is for the botmakers to make even better bots. That was one of the reasons I tried to avoid making threads like this but 888's completele ignorance to the issue and their "we are taking this seriously" email answers, that were not signed by anyone, were just ridiculous when you think about the scope of the problem.

or the banned bots repeatedly trying to log back in