Yet another cheating scandal is about to emerge in the online poker world. This time it's two high stakes players that have fallen victim to a scam. Both players have had trojan horses installed on their computers by a German poker player who has won about $400,000 from them. The victims come from Switzerland and Austria and the German cheater is now located in England. One of the victims is rumor[...] Read more » Another cheating scandal brought into daylight
Joined: Apr '09
Location: Portugal
Age: 44 (M)
Posts: 4827
Computer freaks are everywhere, and they can use their knowledge either for good and bad things, even if bad things means to get rich, in this case. If I have something in my PC that gives the opportunity to my opponent to see the cards I play with, against him, the only thing he will win is misery, once I don’t have big money on online rooms, but this scares anyone. Once again I say, bring Government to online poker, this way this things will be harder to do, I am sure.
Joined: Oct '11
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 38 (M)
Posts: 133
edited because i didn't read the op
i suck i know lol
------------ i've been racking my head around this all day in work
firstly for the hackers trojan to work it would require a live data stream coming from the guy hes playing, now any basic well any shitty firewall for that matter would pick this up as an intruder (i can go into more detail on why it would pick it up as an intruder if you want? but its a little complicated)
my first question would be how could 2 players with such experience be playing online without an active firewall or a virus scanner that would have picked up the horse before any serious damage was done
question 2 would be why on earth would they take things into their own hands instead of dealing with the authorities first them doing this will mean they get nothing back even if the guy was guilty
thirdly unless they have any actual evidence that he put the trojan on their computers then its null and void even if he sent them the trojan via email it's still on their hands
i can only go on my personal experience of a similar case i went through a few years ago
------------
***dont worry i wasn't scamming poker players or nothing that evil i just fked over a former boss and got away with it
Joined: Apr '11
Location: Romania
Age: 35 (M)
Posts: 6669
elfmafia: i think they took the matter in their own hands because they knew the guy that this to them, this links really good on how the trojan horse ended in those guys pc...
I don't think is possible to send the trojan via pokerstars, they somehow exchanged emails(most probably) to plan to trojan in their pc.
Joined: Oct '11
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 38 (M)
Posts: 133
granted they knew him but he still stole a considerable amount of money from them, now if my neighbor hacked me and robbed me of say 10k from my bank i'd be pissed and want to stamp all over his face but id make sure i get my money back first by going the legal route
and its not as simple as planting it in an email either as nothing is 'invisible' nowadays depending on what operating systems the 2 guys had
i dont even think the guys a proper hacker by the sounds of it he just got a desktop remote viewer which is not even a real trojan, and if he did this then he would have needed direct access to each of their computers which is plausible seeing as they where at the same hotel?
@elfmafia: I have some experience with trojan horses offcourse for "educational purposes" and its quite easy infect computers even with a firewall and the most up-to-date antivirus...etc.
As for the live streaming idea its not so hard whenever a hand starts the hacker can take screenshots of the screen every second if he wants to and see his victim's hand everytime. Even with live stream if you got high speed internet you won't notice anything different but if you got a slow connection then its quite easy to notice.
Joined: Nov '11
Location: Netherlands
Age: 54 (M)
Posts: 2
these 2 guys shouldnt play online since they are to stupid to handle computers. i would never acces e-mail and real(big) money accounts on the same computer(bank or pokersite). dont they have money for an extra laptop?
Joined: Jan '11
Location: Romania
Age: 36 (M)
Posts: 167
protect your data!! use antivirus firewall..disable remote acces..scan your computer daily ..never had a problem with that sort of things ..better safe than sorry...
Joined: Feb '08
Location: Switzerland
Age: 34 (M)
Posts: 210
Everything depends on the hacker's skill. If it's just a normal hacker than it's fine and you can protect yourself quite easily. However if the hacker wanted to target these players specifically and created himself the trojan horses, not many things can protect you from this, as no software would know the existence of such trojans. Even worse is if he had a chance to put the trojan himself into the computer of the victims via an usb key (e.g. in the hotel during a live tournament).
Joined: Nov '08
Location: Germany
Age: 47 (M)
Posts: 134
He probably asked them if he could check his e-mails or something and then put the trojan on there PC, and gave an ecception on the fire wall. Easy. Thats why they know it was him. He was probably the only 1 that they allowed to use there Pc´S. Wow I´d probably have a law suit for injuring him.
