My name is Daniel Ashman. I used to post on 2+2 under alias thebruiser500, and was part of the poker community for over ten years. I was previously a HSNL regular and published a couple of poker books.
I have posted various times in the HSNL transfer thread under the name "tomatoe" wanting to trade Bitcoins for Neteller. The user 'asdf26' PMed me saying he wanted to trade $12,000 worth. He said he was Joshua Beckley and that he won 2nd place in the WSOP last year.
I googled 'asdf26' and could see on P5s that this was the name of Josh's Stars account. I also looked through the post history of the 2+2 account and found this post from last year where he was selling action to the Berlin $25k:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/18...markup-1566745
I also posted in the transfer thread asking "has anyone done a transfer with asdf26 before or can comment on his character or know him personally?" and user Jasbral (credible account, created over 5 years ago) replied 90 minutes later with, "I know him personally and have done business with him in the past. No issues working together".
Lastly, I ask him to confirm it is actually Joshua Beckley by posting on Twitter (on his account which has 5,000 followers), which he did. Here is a picture of the PM confirming that tweet:
http://i.imgur.com/6XTNsml.png
The tweet is deleted now, but you can see from the screen shot I posted that it linked to the Twitter account in question. It's not a masked link - it's real.
At this point I felt confident I had done a good amount of due diligence. I sent around $6,000 in Bitcoins. asdf26 replied on 2+2 and said that Mike McDonald (Timex) would be sending the funds in a few hours (not trying to drag Timex's name into this, I have no idea if he knows Josh, but it felt relevant to mention that). I didn't receive any funds. Once I realised that I had been scammed, I sought out Josh on Facebook.
I won't paste the full conversation, but if Josh wants to he is welcome to. It took a while, but eventually we confirmed that:
- The 2+2 account is his, and was hacked.
- The Twitter account is his, and was hacked.
- The hacker messaged Jasbral on Twitter and got him to do the vouch. Jasbral confirms that in
this post and says he doesn't check the board often and the post wasn't him vouching 'for the transaction'.
- Josh says that the hacker 'seems like a hacker that attacked [Jasbral] before'. I'm unclear if he's saying it's potentially the same person, or a similar approach.
Josh is definitely angry with what has happened, but has made it clear that he doesn't think he owes me any money and that 'it was out of his control'. I think there is a responsibility to protect your accounts, especially when you are a pretty public figure in the poker community. I'm interested to know what the community thinks is right, and if there's any precedent here.
Thanks.
Last edited by tomatoe; 08-31-2016 at 04:43 AM.