I haven't been reading the recent discussion. My laptop is now being looked at and other Finns will have theirs also. In case something is found, it can help a lot with the case because for now the crimes committed are not seen as very serious by the police. I've been in contact with the Pokerstars security manager and am way happier with them now, they do seem to do everything in their power to help with this case and definitely understand the seriousness. I can't give more information because it might hurt the investigation, but I will for sure write here if any major advancements are made.

The way the hotel handled this seems in line with how you'd expect them to, but how Stars handled this is just ridiculous. Stars security is a massive joke, has always been, there are infinite examples from over the years but their PR people are very good at handing those situations away from the public eye. Here they failed to protect one of best known highrollers in one of their flagship tournaments in a hotel they massively overcharge players for (basically steal from them).

Or how about when their EPT tournament director of SIX YEARS stole hundreds of thousands from players? How did Stars handle that? Does anyone recall getting any kind of compensation or even an apology? Did they even publically inform they fired Kremser? At least not before 2+2ers dug all the information up and they were forced to come up with a mild reaction at least.

Similarly in online mtts there was a Romanian cartel last / this year selling fake identities to U.S. players, creating them accounts in Romanian banks etc so they could pose as Romanians and multiaccount mtts... it took over 6 months of unpaid detective work from the players to get Stars to even react. Again no compensation, no media announcement, nothing, yeah sure we didn't lose any money to the 11 PEOPLE playing on the idvalentina account alone... not to mention the other 50 guys involved. I mean why would they compensate, they are probably just happy with the rake money flowing and how players are powerless to do anything about it.

The list of these examples is endless, there's absolutely zero reason for the average player to feel safe about their money in Stars tournaments, live and online, I mean how could they when they handle a potential multi-million scam this poorly and then refuse to comment on it at all as always? It's disgusting what they can get away with just because they have monopoly.

Meh, you assume only place for password is windows login or something like that. If you encrypt your whole hard drive your files can't be copied even if the computer is booted to Linux from an USB. And using STRONG password kills your amateur's password hacking apps. Strong password is random enough not to crack under dictionary attacks, and long enough not to crack under brute force.

Use something like TrueCrypt to encrypt the hard drive. It's free (please consider making a donation anyways), open source, versatile, allows use of passwords AND keyfiles etcetc.

wow this is just unreal. I cant help but think that a pokerstars staff member(s) was possibly in on this (probably a low level employee if anything.) Surely the staff at the hotel would have access to the guests affiliated with pokerstars EPT, but only pokerstars staff would be able to affiliate the guest names with the wealthy high stakes accounts. This of course wouldnt necessarily be the case if the perps were only hotel staff and they were simply picking pokerstars guests at random and hitting up as many as they possibly could.

Still amazed at the whole story. Sickest of beats. Best wishes to all !

inside job....either pokerstars or hotel employee or a combination of both.

however I do wonder what the angle is here....if they had done this successfully and it had gone undetected....what was their goal? to steal your hole cards in real time and cheat you on the tables?

this seems like a huge flaw because eventually this stuff would and could be detected...and the beneficiaries would be easily identified. particularly true at high stakes where I presume your a reg? the player pool is so much smaller at those stakes, it seems like it would be very easy to identify whoever was behind this.


good luck

Hello,

One thing is sure, PS don't have anything to so with this scam, but they wanna put the focus away from this scam cause anything haven't happend. Cause If it come out that something like this happens to an EPT that they hold it wil bring a lot of negative talk.
Like the story about Thomas Kremser he was stealing money from side events. And when some players figured it out they fired him and his crew. So when the poker players that put focus on this case, they where told that they would go the court way against them if they went to the media with this.
And I can tell the Kremser episode it was discovered from a finish pro. And ofcourse he did not wanted any legal issues with stars so he dropped the story and never went to the media.
It shows just how much you can trust stars.
If this happend to a poker player in any other tourney where stars was not a sponsor they would take it more serious and go after the criminals.

They just don't want anybody to know his here happens to their events, cause I'm sure alot of people would stop playing the EPT's. and maybe boycut stars/EPT.

Think stars should take these things more serious and tell people what's going on, instead just protect their own business.

While I think there's been some good advice given ITT, you're probably better off going here for answers:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/48...echnical-help/

There are poster in that forum with much more knowledge than many of us here, and there are already good threads on this topic - I'd trust advice you find there over that of some average Joe Schmoe in NVG.

Glad to hear this, and I've been hoping that maybe there was more going on quietly behind the scenes than posters here are aware of. Lots of rushing to judgement ITT.

Jens

You're getting face-palmed by that momo at the Ritz, and not much better from Stars. No real surprise because everyone knows that the worst sanction, for any rule violation in the sites history, is that Randy sends, the perpetrator, an e-mail chronicling his fascinating life story.

I can understand how tiring dealing with this is, so why not get the Finnish Embassy involved. As they have have a consulate based in Barcelona, they'll know proper police, get El Burnside kicking down doors, and be able to apply political pressure to the hotel so that you get proper answers, which you and the other lads targeted deserve.

Left you the details and good luck.

Contact information: Finland´s Honorary Consulate General, Barcelona

Mr. Albert Ginjaume Egido, Honorary Consul General
Ms. Marja Simola, Consular Officer

Postal address:
Consulado General honorario de Finlandia
Puig i Xoriguer, 17
08004 Barcelona
Spain

E-mail: finlandia_barcelona@mundivia.es
Tel: (34) 93 443 1598
Fax: (34) 93 442 4100

Customer service: Mon-Fri 09.00-13.00

So I asked an expert to check my computer and he found a program called "splashtop" that streams my computer to a mobile device. I never used it and I didn't even know what was the program for.

Every poker player should look up if they don't have it installed.
https://twitter.com/chanmix123/statu...60114365669377 people should share this info, and be careful with any suspicious programs.

Wow jeans crazy shhi, hope they find the piece of scums behind all this.. Best of luck with the investigation! All the best to you .. Keep us posted

I was staying with pistons, it's my laptop that is bluescreening now. one detail he forgot to mention is that upon reviewing our hotel bill we noticed we had been charged for 2 outgoing calls which neither of us placed... kinda weird.

I never had a problem with my laptop before either...

Funny how the cameras NEVER work in casinos or hotels when it comes to theft of a customer. But if damage is done to casino or hotel, the cameras are working 100% of the time.

My guess is that people at the hotel were in on it and they now will lose their contract with poker stars next year so they are doing what they can or will lie to make this go away. I wouldn't doubt it if someone from poker stars had something to do with it.

If the someone was clueless enough to send them directly to his computer, yeah sure. What if he sends them to some anonymous server and gets access to that via untraceable connection method? Well okay guess nothing is ever foolproof untraceable but even NSA would have hands full trying to trace him..

Well who assumes the cameras are there for customers benefit

Jens is doing all the right things. And I loved the original post, a great read! Very impressive for (I assume) a non-native English speaker. If poker goes south, he can always become a writer. Another Joseph Conrad (who was Polish, btw). But I digress...

I think people are jumping the gun a bit here. There is a ton of circumstantial evidence, that I grant you. But it's not enough to mobilize action to address this. Certainly not from the police, nor the hotel, definitely not from the Finnish embassy...

Fortunately, you have all the proof you need in your laptops. If they were hacked en masse, as is implied here - if many poker players were attacked - then the evidence should still be on those same computers. And top-notch security experts will be able to find it.

Remember, Jens interrupted their plot (allegedly) before they could implement it. But because they had already hacked a number of laptops (allegedly), the proof should still be there. You can't hack computers to send data to a third party and not leave evidence of this crime.

So where's the evidence? And yes, I grant you that Jens is having his laptop checked out right now, which is smart. Everyone who suspects they were hacked should do the same. If these laptops come back positive, then you have a very good case that should interest the police. And it definitely must interest PokerStars at that point.

I stay in 5-star hotels all the time for work. Sometimes people call my room and hang up once I answer. Sometimes cleaning staff are in my room at strange times. Sometimes phone charges mysteriously appear on my bill. And yes, even my laptop is moved from once side of the room to the other (granted, a lot more than that happened to Jens!)... It's strange, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a conspiracy to hack high stakes poker players. But yes, there is a lot of "smoke"...

You all have your laptops in your possession. Jens did you a great favour by discovering this (alleged) plot before it could be implemented. But if it was done to many players, there should now be ample evidence. Where is it? Get those laptops checked out and have the security team issue a formal report.

--PP

Will you be getting it inspected by a security company?

No. There was immediate evidence that the content of his laptop was definately tampered with because it lost it's password requirement, and there's in all likelihood several hundreds of thousands euros in danger for it. Not acting upon it is like bank manager just shrugging his shoulders after finding out that someone has tinkered and left the vault door open during the night, but not necessarily taken anything.

Funnily enough something like that happened in Finland few decades ago. Two brothers had lockpicked their way into a bank during night and had just messed around in there sitting in managers chair etc. If I recall correctly they did it a couple times, until one time they finally took one gold bar, and got caught a couple of months later while trying to sell it. They were kinda sneaky, but still stupid.

My point was not to dispute something illegal happened. It seems to me that it has.... My focus was on getting hard evidence that the Spanish police, the hotel, Pokerstars, etc. must address.

"My laptop has lost its password requirement!" is not good enough. A report from a respected security firm, detailing how the laptop had been hacked, is definitely good enough. Especially if 2-3 people, all staying in the same hotel at the same time, have similar evidence.

--PP

ruins pretty much every thread in NVG lately

horrible poster on so many levels

aside from that...

amazing thread

I agree with the previous poster a few dozen pages back who said that it's mind boggling that so many high stakes players carry around their laptops without proper security.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars on a computer with archived passwords and personal information, and they just leave it sitting on a hotel room nightstand before heading out to play 10 hours of poker.

the situation sucks, but it's hard for me to dredge up any measure of sympathy for someone that basically leaves behind a suitcase full of cash behind in a hotel room that is easily accessible to minimum wage housekeeping staff.

Its not unreasonable to speculate that hey...maybe some maid who knew the tourney was going on, and that there were going to be high stakes poker pros staying at the hotel called her ex-boyfriend who knew a bellhop who was banging the front desk clerk and owed him or her money for blow or for who knows what.

The possible scenarios here for a set up from the hotel staff are more plausible than any kind of silly conspiracy against PokerStars

Could you be more specific. You stayed at hotel arts during ept barcelona? Was the expert able to find out the exact time this program had been installed on your computer?

Also for everyone else who has had their laptops checked, please let me know if anything is found on the computer. It could help very much with the case.

Splashtop is a legit program used to control your desktop computer from your iphone or ipad. I use it to 1 table on my ipad from time to time. While it is certainly possible it was installed on your computer, if it was simply the default program, you would know when someone is viewing/controlling your computer because a big box flashes up on your monitor saying you are using splashtop. I imagine a good hacker could probably disable this though.

I doubt a hacker would go through the trouble to install a program on your comp, only to end up using splashtop.

If you have a newer computer, it was likely pre-installed.

http://www.splashtop.com/blog/index....e#.UjG9Mii9Kc0

wow