Thanks Rich

I was talking with our attorney today who just had an opportunity to listen to the first tape. He agreed Friedberg needs to have a complaint filed with the Bars of states he is licensed to practice in. I asked if I should do it and he suggested it would be better if victims of the cheating filed the complaint as a judge would put more stock in such a claim. If any of the cheated players are interested in signing a document/complaint, I can assist with some of the verbiage, etc.

Also, thanks again to PokerXanadu for moving this forward. It will be interesting if regulators around the world begin to look into the case.

PokerXanadu, Iovation is surely approved in KGC or at least operates unlicensed if such services do not require a license there. Every issue I ever had after Tom put false info in their DB was KGC, though I guess FTP was also in Alderney so that may be a place to look too.

Since UP in mentioned in title this somewhat applies here. UP has ignored my inquiry into what company replaced Iovation. I posted in their thread and contacted their support. I also contacted Verifi/CAMS, that company also never responded.

I suppose a player should be given this type of information upon request. I am not sure if it is in the regs in NV though. My past articles on it do not mention this and I do not recall ever reading anything like this in there, though they are not to be providing personal info to others.

NJ's regs specifically address this issue, hopefully NV's do too.

Thanks for all the info. Could you post the NJ reg provision that your are referring to?

I may be liberal in my translation of this, but I believe these terms in the NJ regs covers this situation:

Page 50 here:

http://www.nj.gov/oag/ge/docs/Propos...rnetgaming.pdf

Certainly a player that had their information given to Iovation by Verifi/CAMS entered into a contract with both companies. Presumably, under the NJ regs, any player submitting to a doc/ID check would be given the company info that was receiving their info, regardless of whether the company was licensed or not.

I do not think UP is in the wrong here. I feel the blame lies entirely upon Verifi/CAMS. The fact they are ignoring inquiries into their business leaves me further concerned. I am inclined to go to the NGCB to voice this.

If they are willing to contract with Iovation, then refuse to disclose who they are doing business with after being exposed, I have to wonder if Verifi/CAMS belongs in NV's online poker industry. I can forgive their ignorance, but their silence after the fact is entirely different.

I had hoped this process would be transparent enough to receive a reply that included all information on any company that could potentially receive my personal information. If that is not the case then it must be changed.

^I think you are reading too much into the NJ regulations. The only contract the player is entering into as I understand it is the one with the casino. I don't think the regs are saying that sites have to list out all their service providers.

This is a good point to be made in the public comment period. It's now on my list to include.

I found links to all the gambling regulators, so that is now in the bag:
http://www.iagr.org/

I'm working on composing a more detailed letter to send which includes a brief digest history of UB, Iovation, etc.

I now have an image of a bunch of regulators sitting in a room, snickering and throwing spitwads at the KGC. ("Every group has someone that they all make fun of. Like us with Elaine." - George Costanza, "The Van Buren Boys" episode of Seinfeld)

x-post from the Smoking Gun Thread -
Retweetable/editable (make it your own) tweet:
https://twitter.com/propoker/status/336914366387613696

Here is a draft of my letter to regulatory authorities regarding Pierson/Iovation. Comments, suggestions, corrections and advice are welcome.

I intend to send this letter to hundreds (literally) of regulatory authorities across the globe, by e-mail. This includes both regulators of online gaming, as well as jurisdictions which currently regulate only b&m gaming.

Would anyone be interested in funding delivery of hard copies of this letter to the same jurisdictions as well, as a follow-up to the e-mails? I asked Phil Hellmuth if he would like to fund the project, but never heard back from him. (serious).

I am also considering including the AP scandal main events in the timeline as well. If you know them, please post what you think I should put in the timeline.

Another individual/company that needs to be included is Uri Kozai and RealTime Edge. They work with Bwin.party and others. It is likely at least some of the code they employ comes from the original UB developers. More importantly, Kozai was a critical cog in carrying out the wishes of the individuals on the first recording.

When that meeting was held, Pierson works at iovation, Friedberg is independent, Millar and Hamilton at Centaurus Games. Kozai is the primary agent running UltimateBet in the beginning of 2008 having moved into the role after the sale/merger. Though Pierson talks about Norton and Leggett being on board, the only lever he held over the site was access to historical data through Kozai. While Leggett may have been amenable to a curtailed investigation at first, the UB founders made him look incompetent by rendering his press releases inoperable immediately after he issued them. Twice. Each time, he was forced to add names to the list provided by Fosco/Paredes.

brainwashdodo was likely the last straw for Norton and Leggett and Russ Hamilton went into the fire immediately after. When enough time passed, Leggett was forced to reveal a bizarre hardware failure while maintaining they had discovered the full extent of the cheating. The reality is they probably had a serious "come to Jesus" with Kozai/Pierson/Friedberg that ended up resulting in $23M in refunds versus Pierson's optimistic $5M.

Kozai is right in the middle of that. He has full access to the datacenter gear and db admin skills and permissions to play gatekeeper. It is also possible that Jason Dehaan maintained some practical control over the network as he continued to perform the same in a consultant's role well after the IPO. When asked how much Kozai knows, Pierson says "he isn't dumb".

We traced ownership of RealTime Edge to a parent company incorporated in another Canadian Province. The company uses the same Isle of Man/UK based nominee director/offshore specialist as when Pierson "sold" the software to Excapsa to power UB after the IPO. His name is David Allen Boothman. If Pierson is the actual owner of RealTime Edge, then a straight line can be drawn from the meeting recording to Leggett's tooth pulling exercises that caused months of delay and continued underreporting of cheating accounts/screennames.

At the very least, Kozai prepared a loss report without identifying he was a major shareholder of Excapsa or that he was at the time servicing the software driving Russ Hamilton's company, Centaurus. His conflicts of interest should have immediately ruled him out as any kind of "independent" agency.

Kozai's company currently services licensed firms and the software platform they use at RocketFrog could easily become a marketable product in newly legalized regimes.

Note: Kozai's defense might be that the company did refund more than Messrs Pierson and Friedberg desired, yet we know with certainty there are cheating screennames missing from the final lists, showing the company was successful in limiting the damage to some extent. Also, there is still the issue of games like Limit holdem receiving far lower refunds when there definitely was cheating in those games.

For further updates on this project, see my thread in Poker Legislation:

Informing Regulators about Iovation/Pierson/UltimateBet

So someone correct me if I'm wrong here.

Has Ultimate Poker informed anyone which verification company they're now using?

They're obviously using one.

I found that Verifi processed my e-check deposit there a few days ago, so for sure they are still associated with Verifi.

Unless I'm wrong here, Ultimate Poker has refused to provide us with the name of the new company providing verifications.

Why is that?

Is it possible that they're still using Verifi/CAMS and the Iovation link has just been better hidden (i.e. no "Iovation error" when something goes wrong)?

I think they owe the poker community the name of the new company providing verification, after this entire debacle.

Hi Todd!



Seriously, you really think they would do anything shady like that with NGCB breathing down their backs, or are you just attention whoring?

They aren't breaking any laws or regulations by continuing to use Iovation after telling the community they weren't.

I can picture the situation being something like this:

UP: "Hey Verifi, we are getting a lot of complaints about Iovation because of their history. Is there anything we can do about this?"

Verifi: "Yes, we contract with several verification companies. We'll switch to another one."

UP: "Okay, cool. Any idea which company so we can tell our customers?"

Verifi: "We haven't decided upon one yet, but we will make the decision quickly, and it won't be Iovation."

UP: "Okay, great. We'll tell 2+2 that we dropped Iovation."

(A few days later)

UP: "Hey, so which company is verifying user information now?"

Verifii: <crickets>

UP: "Hey, we'd really like to know this."

Verifi: "I'm sorry, but we can't reveal that information, because our partner does not want their company to be scrutinized by the public over this. But you can totally trust us that it's not Iovation. If that's not good enough, you can feel free to take your business elsewhere."

UP: "Nah, it's cool. We'll just stick with 'not Iovation' when people ask."

Agree.

I don't think he's attention whoring, it's a valid point.

But I would think it's unlikely they would choose to try to hide Iovation instead of legitimately dropping all ties to them. Being the first site and in a review period and with scrutiny from the public and regulators now over this, that would seemingly be an unwise move, even if Iovation were the only company that could prevent fraud out there.

My understanding is Iovation is not player verification. It's fraud prevention (it's basically a cross-operator blacklist). If that's the case, its optional; its one part of an anti-fraud policy which can be dropped and not replaced.

Correct. Iovation was one of the fraud prevention tools used, they could remove this tool while continuing to use CAMs without it affecting their business. Iovation was just another layer of protection, it is not "the" protection. That layer has been removed, and hats off to UP for doing it so quickly while notifying Nevada Gaming about the Iovation situation as soon as they learned about the issue. To the best of my knowledge, nothing replaced Iovation because Iovation's services are not really needed... think of Iovation as more of a security blanket that makes investors happy, but its not needed.

How long would it take Iovation to rebrand under a shell company with no public trace to their ownership. Greg has lots of experience doing it. In that case UP could be told by Verifi that Iovation was dropped and they would be telling the truth.

CUZ NO GOV'T AGENCY HAS EVER DONE ANYTHING SHADY AMIRIGHT

If a new company appears out of thin air with no track record and immediately gets this very lucrative and important account I am sure the community would sniff it out in a second.

Agreed. This does not worry me at all. The online gaming industry is just a small fraction of Iovation's business, I doubt they would take this route but if they did - given time we the community would find out and expose them once again.

PS: Why son't we see the same anger over the use of Iovation by the other big international networks? No need to name names, because that list includes virtually all networks except Stars. FTP used to utilize Iovation but stopped once it was purchased by Stars.

I'm getting close to finishing my project to inform all gaming regulators across the world about Iovation:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/57...tebet-1335007/

If you'd like to assemble a list of e-mail addresses for all the poker sites/networks, I can send them the letter as well.

I have asked UP in their thread here and emailed support asking what company replaced iovation. My question went unanswered.