I'll just say thank you WCG for coming forward and bringing this to people's attention. Yes the master shower part is by far the best and would freak me out if i had noticed such a thing.

I'm not going to make aspersions of judgments on jungleman's character here, I'll just say that he needs to try to do a better job writing like an adult without cursing and vitriol in every sentence. Makes it more likely people will hear what he has to say.

Also Jungle, at the very least maybe you should be a hell of a lot more careful who your friends are. You seem to have a track record of being acquaintances on up with people of questionable moral values to say the least. Try harder to surround yourself by good people?

hmmm I think youre right about the cursing certainly. I think the track record thing is somewhat exaggerated. Everyone has met/associated with shady characters... and these judgments were made after the people I associated with did something bad (except perhaps josh, for whom there were rumors of him doing something bad). In addition i have associated with many people in many ways. Regardless, I think you are right and will use more caution in the future.

Can OP provide all the other screen names he believed were cheating? Kind of an incomplete PSA to help the community without it.

I'm rather interested in the technical aspects of this. The poker/scandal/asshattery of this has been pretty well chewed through at this point, and I won't trash JM as I've known far too many people that we're entirely too trusting of people and always seeing the good in people, even people they thought were asshat. But the technical piece of this... this interests me greatly.

I work IT, and I've had to do forensic investigations more times than I care to remember, to include piecing together the last few hours of someone's life (no, I'm not a cop, but they couldn't do it).

The swapped out router may or may not prove interesting. At best it may hold some traffic logs, port forwarding configurations... something along those lines, but the meat will be on the systems in questions, not likely the router.

Recovering anything of interest would be quite difficult at this point, but not impossible, especially for someone more skilled than me. I could do a bit with it, but someone that is a dev would be better, especially if they had a very deep understanding of file systems and reconstructing data.

Someone could scan the drive to recover files, piece together as much as possible of the ones that have been overwritten or otherwise corrupted, eliminate known files and other stuff that should be there, and take a nice hard look at the rest. With a little luck, it could potentially even be possible to piece together exactly what happened. Especially if this was done on multiple systems. Patterns can emerge pretty quick if the data can be obtained.

I find it curious that you mention specifically Facebook and Skype. Is there a particular reason you suspect these in some way of contributing to this? The way I read what you posted, you seem to be indicating that you believe something about these things contributed to this. Can you elaborate there?

Just to be sure no one misreads my post, I'm not suggesting the OP should send me their stuff, I'm just random internet person. I just find the technical piece interesting and have had to do forensic investigations on computers in the past so my natural inclination is to start piecing things together in my head and developing a plan to reconstruct what happened. If the OP has the spare change available (several thousand dollars at least in this situation given the amount of time that has passed and the system(s) being in use since the incidents) and the inclination however, they could seek out data recovery specialists to try to piece together what happened.

I know I'd want to know, and if it was beyond my ability, I'd definitely hire someone to track it down, and then you CAN press criminal charges for someone compromising your system.

On that note though, and just playing devil's advocate here, but is it possible that this Josh fellow was just helping himself to browse dirty things and picked up internet herpes that someone else took advantage of?

Given the scenario I find it highly unlikely. UK users were the ones taking advantage and he's from the UK, he asked to come back after it stopped working the first time and it suddenly started happening again, etc.... too much against him. He's either the unluckiest Lemony Snickit in this series of unfortunate events or he's an asshat. The evidence certainly points to asshat.

Glad you got almost all of your money back OP. It may be worth it to at least get an estimate for a technical investigation of your systems though.

whats the incentive? what are you hoping to find out? from what I remember from similar cases where people have their pc examined the result is something along the line 'someone installed a remote viewing trojan, data send to ip in x country' and then what?

I would understand if you have zero clue what happened but thats not the case here.

That's more then enough to begin a criminal investigation. Just what you said is enough to nail someone.

Also, depending on what the data is, could also find out how compromised the system was, if other stuff was accessed, other actions taken, etc.

My own interest is just in that I actually rather like doing forensics investigations. Like solving little mysteries and puzzles and trying to reconstruct something. Like I said mine is a technical interest. What interest it may have for the OP pretty much ends at being able to press criminal charges. If indeed it does point at access from the UK, that's bad news for whoever did it. With all of our treaties, that's a huge problem for whoever did it. FBI would probably end up involved, and whatever isp the address would track to (and depending on the method of access the fingerprints left could be MUCH worse for the perpetrator than just an ip) would finger them in a heartbeat.

Proving what happened at that point would be more a formal matter than anything else.

There is no eliminating the trail of clues when it comes to computers. It's just a matter of time.

I don't know that the op would have much incentive. I'd want to know just for knowing's sake from the technical standpoint, but that's me.

The scary thing is that if the scammer used more than half his brain when playing the scamming sessions then OP and his housemates would never have known they were scammed. Makes you wonder how much of this goes on undetected.

Seems like the "perfect crime". There is limited risk of detection (if you're not an idiot), very difficult to prove beyond doubt, no-one ever gets prosecuted in any case and the downside if you do get caught is just the loss of profits (or the part that hasn't been withdrawn yet). Even better, some victims are themselves breaking rules (e.g. not paying taxes, playing in the wrong country etc) which discourages them from complaining or going public.

If the sites (read Stars) are going to stamp this out they need to help create more consequences for the perpetrators (e.g. public disclosure or legal action). Most players are not equipped to pursue these cases legally (e.g. get a court order to make the site dislclose the account owner and hand details, follow up with civil case etc), especially as there are multi-juristiction issues.

If they don't do something to stamp it out then its just going to grow exponentially. This is just too easy a way to make $5-digits for some of the marginal characters and gambling degenerates that this game unfortuantely attracts. One day one of these stories will find its way into the general media and that won't be good news for online poker.

this topic is not about Jungleman's involving with Joshua, nor with Girah and that scandal (which I was part of - I've met Jungle after and yes, he's naive - but he's not a scumbag). There's a reason why no HSNL player is pointing fingers at Jungle here; only NVG-tards with reg date 2012/2013 are, because they love having a scape goat to throw **** at and Jungle is an easy target. topic should be moderated from now on.

So let me get this straight. It was Professor Tyler in the master shower with the router?

I was introduced to Joshua Tyler by some english friends at EPT Berlin, only met him that once... After that he added me on facebook and countless times invited me to some privat PLO games in LA/cali when I was in vegas...

Prob pretty lucky that I never could fit it in... :/

Okay so I just deleted probably 300 posts from this thread and I'm on life tilt at the ******ed stuff in here. If I missed something crappy, sorry....if I deleted a post from a regular that should have stayed, sorry. :P

lol blitz.


This. The next NVG tard that decides to chime in with their opinion on jungleman, or this situation is gonna get banned. If you don't or haven't regularly played HSNL, just stop, noone here cares. Certainly there will be exceptions made for people that actually bring something to the table other than their idiotic opinion.

lol @ derailaments about VPN's, just holy crap.

One more complaint, stop feeding the trolls cheet, good gracious bro.


Jungle: I left Kilowatt's posts, I think it's pretty clear to any realistic observer he's pretty lol here, but I think the posts should stay including the responses to them from you/HSNL folks.

Have to chime in....

Tyler has always been a ****, from the moment he outdrew me in a £10 tournament about 7 years ago (true story).... Someone mentioned earlier he acts like a douche, this is true.

I know him a bit better than most, he's good friends with my very close friends brother, who confirms he's a ****

/end rant

Balance of probabilities he's guilty: jungleman who I've also met and played with (not in a sexual manner) clearly has nothing to do with this, I don't understand all the hate. Yes he's a bit socially awkward, but if OP doesn't assign blame why on earth is anyone else?

Anyways, Tyler was implicated in stealing a lot of money from Feldman back in the day; to quote my friend bro 'one day he turned up with a brand new mini'.... AFAIK he's not from a rich family Btw.

This and other smoke rings tend to point towards a fire.

OP did the right thing airing this, in fact I'm amazed at how classy his post is. He's obviously 100 percent certain it was JT, but does nothing but lay down the facts. Respect bro.

Oh and what's with the shower???

MOD NOTE: GG, anyone else want to play?

<3 jalexand

rather than deleting and banning posters i wish we could just reduce them to only the ability to post images

It's amazing that every time there is some sort of cheating scandal, the cheater does something insanely stupid to get caught. It makes you wonder how many times people have been cheated by smart cheaters with a reasonable understanding of poker and could therefore make the play look legitimate.

Pretty much. I feel like any good player could use the advantage of knowing hole cards in just a way to hero calls/bluffs at the right times just often enough to beat great players without making them super suspicious. These superuser hacks all seems to be done by morons.

I think they are too lazy to actually work on their game (or even bumhunt) so somehow I doubt the same person would put any effort into coming up with a good exit strategy.

People need to stop posting about what the cheaters did wrong and how amazingly profitable it would be to do xyz instead.

It's incredible how naive and trusting highstakes poker players with great intelligence(to the extent of crushing a complex game like poker) can be. Companies like Google or Microsoft do not allow strangers introduced by friends/acquaintances to sleep unsupervised at their headquarters. In fact, I can't think of any company of any size that would do that. If you're a professional poker player, then poker is a business and the place you play poker is your office. Doug already calls the room he plays poker to be his office... so I can't fathom why you would leave it unlocked for an acquaintance to access.

Doug, for your sake(and for everyone else that crushes highstakes), I would put locks on your office.. keep it locked even from your roommates. There's absolutely no reason why anyone should have access to your laptop when you're not home, unless it's your wife. Anyone rooming with you that finds that to be offensive probably isn't someone you can 100% trust anyway. You have a large amount of money on the line here... think about it if you own a Porsche do you just let anyone you remotely know drive it anytime they like? Then why allow anyone access to your laptop by leaving it there in the open in an unlocked room? I'm just an MSNL player occasionally HS but I would never in a million years let anyone access to my laptop.

As for jungleman, dude either you're naive or more than just plain naive but considering your role in the girah scandal, I'm sure the last thing you want is for your name to be linked in any way to another scandal. For your sake you really should cut down on acquaintances, let alone referring them to other people. Everyone will have a life after poker and the last thing you want is to have your real name linked to all these scandals thus making it hard for you to gain employment or take out a loan or be in business in the future. Plenty of people know that you have money and that your best friends also have money. They also know from 2p2 that you can be naive and sometimes even a lot more guilty than naive for eg. girah. Regardless of your role in any of that you should know that because of that public perception you are more likely to attract people who want to try something devious than someone like Phil Galfond(using him as example since he seems to have a very 'clean' image). So strangers and new friends have much more incentive to talk to you with questionable motives... just like someone who knows you play loose is much more likely to have a wider range in a hand against you. So you should consider much more than just what people say to you, in the same way that you would consider your action in a hand against more types of hands in someone's range because it's you and not some nit they're playing against. This shouldn't be hard to understand... you master this in poker just apply it to real life.

One last thing, we all google the names of other players at the table when we get down to last few tables of a large tournament, so it's beyond me why HS players with sizable bankrolls don't do the same kind of research when a new acquaintance tries to get too close for no good reason. If someone named XXX from UK is trying to be my good friend all of a sudden and I have a lot of money on the line I would ask any UK friend I have to see if they know anything about this guy before I give him keys to my house.

This in its entirety. The problem however, is the solution, not recognition of the existence of the problem. Welcome to the Mild West

Yeah, agreed. Difficult for players to identify the solution though as we don't generally have legal resources. I see the problem as analagous to bank account and credit card fraud and should be treated in a similar way. The customer plays his part by reporting it to the police (with encouragement/assistance from the bank). The bank does the rest by providing the authorities with evidence in criminal cases and by pushing civil cases where appropriate.

The banks/card companies are also expected to operate decent systems to alert account holders if there are signals of potential fraud on their card/account. The equivalent on a site would be auto-detecting patterns of suspicious play like that witnessed by OP and doing something about it like suspending the scammer's account so cash can't disappear before they investigate properly. For example, how hard can it be for software to detect some of the stuff OP described (bearing in mind they get to see both players hands while OP detected it solely from visible cards). Danger signals might inlude playing unusual frequencies, winning exceptionally high proportions of hands as well as ridic -EV type plays that work repeatedly. This should be automatic on anything 5/10 and above.

In the case of poker I also feel more disclosure by the sites would be helpful. For example, in serious clear cut examples they could bring civil cases against the offender (on behalf of the victim(s) if its not possible for the claim to be assigned to the site). Making examples of one or two bad apples would do a lot to constrain the activity imo. Apart from anything else this would alert the community and other sites to the scammer's identity.

atm a scammer can be discovered by a site and all they do is confiscate whatever is left in his account. In many cases they don't tell the victims
the account name even so the victims can't take any action themselves because they don't know who did it. The site just credits the victims' accounts if they happen to have recovered anything (I suspect many sites don't even do that!). Often the victims have no way of knowing if they've been scammed or by how much. The scammer suffers no real consequences and is then free to continue scamming on other sites.

Stars seems to care about this more and does a better job than others (and some lol-sites don't even do anything when they're given the evidence on a plate) but as the scammers get more sophisticated I feel like the bar needs to be raised even at Stars.

tl;dr but basically sites need to do more to nip this in the bud.

Did OP or housemates run any scans before they reformatted? Wondering if something like this shows up on a typical virus scan or malware scan or could something like this be sophisticated enough to be undetected

Or did they run scans or anything and find nothing before they figured it out?

You'll have to excuse me if this is an increadibly stupid question to ask, but what is Stars evidence against this guy? Does it consist of actual technical evidence that WCG's hole cards were seen, or was it more along the lines of looking through the HHs and saying "yea, no way he wasn't super-using, just look at these plays! This is damning enough to refund the money." What I'm getting at, is that if it turns out Stars was able to confirm that superusing was done via a technical way, it could prove useful information for us, both in order to track down the guy who did it, but also in order to protect ourselves from similar threats in the future.