It's the two phone calls that OP gets that does it for me. Maybe they were trying to get you back out the room and missed window to catch the ****ers.

Caller - your taxi is ready for the airport
OP - sweet, ill be 2mins.
Tell room mate to hide in bathroom with blunt object.

I must say this again. Having good reviews on tripadvisor (and similar) might be the most important thing these days on hotel business.
People with money want to stay at the best place there is and people with lower budget want the best value.
That said it's a bit hard to translate this story so people who know little about online poker understand it.
I can't think any other business where computer security plays so crucial role and ordinary people are just more worried about hard assets as money, jewelry and physical safety when it comes to staying hotels.

This all day.

Oh, and...actual newspapers, obviously. I'm sure you can find a bunch that'll be happy to run the story.

Then why wouldn't the hotel just look at the tapes and find out who did it?

You really think this is going to go viral?

Probably not related but this happened very close to OP's hotel.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic...Catalonia.html

****s cray

Or a hacker/player following the circuit who knows the hotel will be swarming with wealthy players. What's a couple of K in travel when they know they can cover the cost of the trip in one hand?

I for one will not be returning next year if its at the same venue. Gl OP, even tho from what my experience is with "The Man" in that area your a dog for sure.

Hope you run good,
Kenny G

Let's assume that Pokerstars has some pull with the hotel here, presumably they do.

Assuming it was someone from Pokerstars (my first thought would be the guy meeting with hotel security), what if that person from Pokerstars who was meeting with hotel security told hotel security some BS like this:

"Here's the deal. We've suspected that these players are cheating and have some sort of special software on their laptops that we've never been able to identify or get our hands on. We needed to physically access their laptops in order to check them out and track down this software, and that is why we needed to briefly take the laptops from their room. Now, obviously I don't need to tell you that these players can't know this. So how about I give you a few thousand dollars and we'll try explain this away as his roommate was behind the whole thing all along. I'm sure we can convince him of that."

Hand your laptop to PokerStars, so they can investigate whatever spyware/other trash is installed.

Btw: hacking a Windows password takes about a minute if you know how to do it.

Wow, this is so ****ed up.
Hope this gets sorted bro!

Assuming you can all but 100% rule out your friend/roommate as the culprit, the fact that they tried to pin it on him is absolutely alarming. Might be the most WTF moment of the entire story seeing how easy it would be to confirm it wasn't him.

Crazy all around.

Might be getting to the point where you just can't travel with a laptop and can only play online from your home/apartment.

I would pay 12.99 for a documentary about bringing the people responsible to justice.

Please catch these criminals, there needs to be repercussions or else they will just keep stealing from legitimate players.

My buddy and I have been staying at Arts all week during EPT. We've both left our laptops in the room, what precautions should we take? We are pretty much poker nobody's so probably won't attract much attention, but better being safe than sorry.

The room keys here do seem very temperamental. Apparently when you keep them in your wallet or near credit cards they don't work and have to be reset.

FWIW Hotel Arts is extremely baller, probably one of the best hotels in Europe and the staff have generally been very polite and helpful.

I really hope this **** gets sorted for you guys.

I highly recommend to not delete anything from laptop and do not connect him to your home network, instead find a knowledgeable professional in it security and somebody who is good with trojans/spyware (probably smb from anti malware company - there's plenty) and hire him for good $/h

Best bet is not to find a guy who actually took and brought laptop back (who cares he prob work for somebody).

It seems there's a big operation going - they probably bribed hotel security, they figured out what room you and other hs pro living and so.

If you think this through this operation could bring millions to a mastermind. See youself:

Goal of operation obv is not to steal money from your account - it's stupid and clearly preventable.

Goal have to be is to put small spyware, that would broadcast your pocket cards to server, and then villain could easily just play tables where you playing and you or pokerstars NEVER will figure it out, is he's smart enough. Look this way your winrate will suffer for let say 1-2bb and that guy will get that 1bb lifetime (as long he remain control over your pcs at home). That could turn out to be easily 200k-1kk/year/person (like rake).

So I would examine laptop with great effort to figure out what's going on. Don't mind drones in security - they don't care and I don't think it's possible to hold them liable (if smb steal from your room laptop with trade secrets of $1kkk hotel is not liable for all that money, you can sue but in this case there's no damages been done that could be proved in court of law as I see) so focus on real thing - who are they and what they want to do because this could happen again - if this opportunity is indeed lucrative is not hard to figure out where smb live and break in if you are pro I assume.

good luck

+1 about writing this as a trip advisor review, far too dodgy what's happened here

This isn't the wild west, if you happen to do some real damage to him, you'll get in much more trouble than he ever will. Also: not everybody has balls of steel.

This story is just insane. If this doesn't get resolved I need to make some adjustments to how I see movies... Movies where villains pull some ingenious scam are closer to the truth as I imagined, while movies where cops actually give a **** are far more off...

I really really hope this gets resolved and people and organizers will learn from this.

Everyone using a laptop for poker travel should have

1) bios password on the laptop
2) hard drive password set in the bios these are harder to crack than windows password (if someone has physical access to your computer they can clone/ghost your hard drive then bring the cloned hard drive back home and have unlimited time to crack it there, all without you knowing)
3) windows password / mac password
4) have a virtual machine inside your laptop to play only poker on. Also create another virtual machine for browsing internet, social sites, booking travel etc.
5) bring a small router/firewall to the hotel. At home use a UTM unified threat management device

You should fly out of there. It's one thing to try and hack a computer but it's another for them to have total physical access to your quarters.

Jesus, your room had more traffic than frankfurt airport.

Sick read. I read that like a horror novel. Was legit scared at times. Hopefully this all works out.

Some people I know who lived in Spain said nothing is safe there. Even on top floor apartments you must have bars on your window or your stuff will be broken into. This just sounds like every other story I heard about this country (No offense). HEard you get barraged from the second you get off the plane by everyone begging for money and if it aint tied down it will be stolen. This story sounds like it fits perfectly with the rep of this place

I think everyone who plays EPTs would really appreciate a greater Stars presence in this thread.

should post all of the internet about the hotel so they lose their business imo

very strange the hotel acted like this...