Is this ever happened to anyone here? Pokerstars claim my IP showed in a different country even tho I only logged in from my home using the same PC.

After I received this mail I contacted stars live support and their rep has confirmed that my location is indeed the country which I am registered in and he suggested that perhaps there was a technical issue on stars end or on my ISP provider. He confirmed that I was not hacked or anything and there is also no suspicious activity on my account and balance. He said I have nothing to worry about and he will forward this information to security so they can continue to process my withdrawal requests however after a few hours security contacted me and claimed I was using VPN which is bizarre given that their own rep has confirmed live that I am not.

This has never happened to me during that last ~8 years I have been playing on stars. Has anyone else ever experienced the same thing and if so how was it resolved?

Anything to try and keep the money in the system

But nah.

Had another live chat. They claim that they're seeing me connected from 2 different IP's(2 different countries) simultaneously.
How is that even possible?!
Im not that tech savvy but everytime I google my Ip location on various sites it only shows my ip of my actual country.
So fkn tilting that they come out of nowhere with this nonsense after years playing and cashing out w 0 problems and now I'm stuck in limbo w their support.
Any suggestions how to handle this?

In which country are you registered?

they are probably talking about your ipv4 address and your ipv6.

if i had to bet, op is on a vpn that only does ipv4, didnt disable ipv6, his real location leaked and got caught.

gl to you, you can check it here http://ipv6-test.com/

What country are you in and what country do they claim your secondary IP is from?

This read make me kinda sick!! BEcause one month ago the same happend to me. I never experience anything like this before. I played one sit go had 400 dollar about. Suddenly i can see my money just disapear. First 200 dollar. then hundred. Then rest .... I ask stars support what the **** happend??? they told me i played live casino. The fun part here is i cant play live casino i have not the latest adobe. And i rare play casino to. They close my account and investigate. i get same answer for two weeks!!!! that they only find my ip adress log in and cant do nothing about this case. Suddenly after 14 days they tell me that they found 2 ip adresses log ins the same time i played sit go!!!!!! I ask how is this possible. they tell me that iam hacked. But its my fault that someone got my stars password that i was not careful. This makes me mad. i never been hacked and play online forever.... but its nothing i can do The ip adresses i track was in polen and usa!!!! i lost my 400 changed email and reboot computer. got even stars pin. But still iam not feeling safe.... And i think stars support very bad. They also remind me that they are not responsible in this case. but thats okay ,all i wanna know is what happend to me. Still cant believe it !!!!! and if many other players here been hacked it has to be some bug from stars then?? what country is your two ip adresses from??

I am not on any vpn. I live in Cyprus but according to stars I show IP's for oth Cyprus and Germany. Obv there is nothing to hide if I was in fact located in Germany.
Fwiw I'm not banned or anything and I can still access and play on my account. It's just a security measure they use when they a cash-out request from a foreign location.
I have tried the ipv6 test and it shows Cyprus. Simple IP location searches on google also show Cyprus so I'm not sure why to stars it shows Germany. Any suggestions?

Thanks for sharing but this isn't the case with me. No one has accessed my account and no funds are missing. All transaction and activity history was mine.

Hi,

This sounds like a good and safe thing for PokerStars to do - indeed, many people in this forum have criticised PokerStars for not doing more of this in the past.

There's no such thing as an IP address having a "country" - only third-party databases which are used to provide a best estimate on where that IP address is likely to be. In this circumstance, it sounds like the third-party database that PokerStars uses thought that you might be in a different country to where your account is registered. In that circumstance, it is good that PokerStars pauses your cashout and investigates further (which is exactly what they did here).

After all, you don't want someone to log in to your account from elsewhere and make a withdrawal, do you?

I agree with Josem on this. It's a nice precautionary measure. I can't explain why your IP address was temporarily shown (to Stars) as Germany instead of Cyprus, but the internet is sometimes weird like that. (My own "IP location" is often wrong by hundreds of miles, but it's always been in the correct country). I don't think Stars was trying to cause you problems.

Don't get me wrong, I am also glad they have this in place and I realize it's for protecting their players.
What I don't understand is why after investigating and confirming that there was no suspicious or fraud activity they still hold on to my withdrawal?
So it's a technical misfortune that is beyond my control. It's either a problem on pokerstars database as Josem pointed out or it's caused by my ISP but either way I'm stuck without having access to my funds.
I would expected them to varify my location by another way( I offered video calls, GPS screenshots or anything else they would wish) and after verification to release my funds for now and then we'll still try and resolve this ip issue.

I don't understand that. Maybe email them and ask for an update?

They might have released it, and not communicated it clearly to you, perhaps?

No, this is not caused by your ISP. That's not how IP-based geolocation systems work.

Thanks for replying. Of course I emailed them. I've been spending hours every day since it started emailing back and forth and chatting with live support but unfortunately they insist that I have to show Ip address that shows Cyprus and I can't or at least don't know how to do that given that it's beyond my control.
It seems you understand much more than I do when it comes to these technical matters. Do you have an idea what more can I do?

You can't reasonably be expected to "show an IP address that shows Cyprus" because the Cypriot designation happens entirely inside PokerStars' systems.

IP addresses don't have countries; they don't have actual geographic locations. Instead, what happens is that PokerStars asks a third-party provider for that company's best guess of where the IP address is probably (physically) located. Of course, that guess is sometimes wrong, and that's an error on their end.

If you're physically located in Cyprus, then I suggest you ask for your case to be escalated for review by a supervisor. In addition, if you have a mobile device, you might be able to try using that to prove where you're connecting from, since PokerStars might be able to use other (mobile-based) verification on that device to establish where you are located.

I have tried escalating to a supervisor but no progress has been made.
Regarding your mobile suggestion, they want my main device which I play from (desktop pc).
In fact today I logged into my stars account with my laptop from a restaurant's wifi and stars confirmed They are seeing Cyprus but that's not good enough apparently and they need to see it from my Desktop pc.

SpewNL,

What you are describing here is not possible.

Thus, there are two possibilities for what is happening:

1) You are misunderstanding what they are saying to you, and describing it inaccurately to us.

2a) The person who is emailing you does not understand what they are doing (or 2b - have made some sort of writing error in describing this to you)

The decision of what country to allocate to an IP address is between PokerStars, and their data supplier. PokerStars does not appear (to me) to even mention who their data supplier is on their website, so I don't understand how you can be expected to change what country their data supplier allocates your IP address to.

Yes I understand that. My guess is that when they say "shows Cyprus" they mean what you say, that their data supplier allocates the IP for Cyprus. Perhaps it's a technical false way of describing it but I guess it sounds simpler and that's the way they expect most people to get the point.

I'll email them again quoting your posts and see what they reply with.

Update: I was able to connect my pc to a different network and after a few hours stars processed my cashout.
I'm very confident that it is a problem on their identifying methods/3rd party db as Josem suggested itt and yet i had to spend hours a day for several days trying various different ways to find a network that stars allocate it's ip to Cyprus.

The vast majority of financial accounts that people in much of the Western world use have no meaningful "name" that really matters in situations like this.

When you make a transaction on a credit card (debit or credit with any merchant, not just gambling accounts), for example, your name is entirely irrelevant to the transaction. Of course, it would be a lol-tastic security hole in the payment processing system if a merchant was able to verify the name on a given bank account. That's why that doesn't happen.


Perhaps the closest to a meaningful name would be restricting Paypal (or other email-based accounts) to the same email address as registered on the merchant's customer account.