Hopefully there is now enough evidence of fishiness for this to find its proper place in the "news" category, or at least "gossip". The thread in the internet forum is becoming a bit of a tangled mess so I have written some cliff notes to present to the poker community a bit of a nasty situation on pitbullpoker.com.
History of pitbull poker:
-sometime around 2000 Federico Schiavio, a high level IT employee of Binions, registered the domain wsop.com
-he began developing custom poker software to launch a poker site on this domain
-March 23, 2004 Harrahs begins legal action against Mr. Schiavio over the wsop.com domain
-April 19, 2004 Dimensus Ltd is formed. This is the parent company of pitbull poker.com.
-WSOP.com under Mr. Shiavio announces an arrangement with pitbull poker.
They begin using the wsop.com website to push pitbull poker.
It appears pitbull uses the custom software written by Mr. Schiavio
originally for the wsop.com poker site he was planning.
There is another interesting person in this story; Kevin Baronowsky.
He is the registrant of the following domains:
pherx.com a pherehormone selling site
pitbullpokr.com(no typo) which redirects to pitbullpoker.com
xardplayer.com(no typo) also redirects to pitbullpoker.com
dsscanuck is a screen name it appears he used on a forum that discusses illegally accessing satellite television. In a discussion on that forum it seems that he was busted by a government agency for selling illegal equipment and turned informant against his customers.
dsscanuck.com is now a blank website that holds banners for pherx.com and eczemaderm.com.
eczemaderm.com is a site that sells a steroid cream product and happens to be hosted on the pherx.com servers.
What puts all this together is that wsop.com was also hosted on the pherx.com servers.
Recent Cheating Allegations:
-there have been a number of seperate allegations that pitbull poker is cheating its own customers through the ability to see hole cards
-the players have requested their hand histories in a useable format and pitbull has refused
-as of today, July 24, 2009, players can no longer access any hand histories online. It remains to be seen if this is temporary or permanent.
Other interesting facts:
-Dimensus Ltd the parent company of pitbull poker was dissolved March 10, 2009, leaving no apparent owner. PBDave has stated ownership transferred to a company based in Cyprus but no documentation of this has been provided.
-Dimensus has never held a gaming license, but claims to be located in Costa Rica where one is not necessary. Pitbull has presented itself as a UK company making this an illegal gambling business. The UK gaming commission has already been informed.
I should add that it is not know who actually owned dimensus, the parent company of pitbull. Dimensus was owned by 2 companies based in the British Virgin Islands, and appear to be shell companies. The BVI do not require these sorts of businesses to disclose ownership to the public. The two people discussed above seemed to have the closest ties to pitbull of anyone that can be found, but it is not known if they really own it or not.
Many links to references supporting the claims in this post can be found at
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...4/index17.html
Last edited by chesterboy; 07-24-2009 at 08:28 PM.
Reason: cleaned up format