How Online Gamblers Unmasked Cheaters - 60 Minutes/Washington Post Joint Investigation Questions Honesty, Security Of Gambling Sites

CBS news program 60 minutes will air the 30th of November about the cheating that has been going on at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker...

The first story is about a player called Graycat that was killing the game for months even though his play was terrible and he won with 15 standard deviations above the mean, which was approximately equivalent to winning a one in a million jackpot six consecutive times.

The other story is about the player Potripper who made the 10-high call against Marco "CrazyMarco" Johnson in a $1,000 buy-in tournament in September of 2007. The Potripper was later traced to the headquarters of Absolute Poker in Costa Rica after a player requested his hand history and instead received more information than he should have, including other players cards and ip addresses.

The Washington Post's Steve Kroft and the team behind 60 minutes have been investigating these matters for over 4 months and will now send a program about it on Sunday the 30th at 7:00pm ET on CBS.

A collaboration by two of the world's most respected news organizations reveals how online poker players suspecting cheating were forced to successfully ferret out the cheaters themselves. That's because managers of the mostly-unregulated $18 billion Internet gambling industry failed to respond to their complaints.

The results of the four-month investigation by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen and The Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gilbert Gaul will appear this Sunday, Nov. 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.

"He was raising, just really, really bad hands against very good hands. He seemed to play crazy," says Todd Witteles, a computer scientist turned poker player who believed he was losing too much to the same person. "It seemed like he was giving his money away. Except the only thing was, he wasn't losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day," Witteles, who played a key detective role, remembers.

Michael Josem, a player and a computer security expert, plotted the odds of such consistent success. "We did the mathematical analysis to find that they were winning at about 15 standard deviations above the mean…approximately equivalent to winning a one-in-a-million jackpot six consecutive times."

The cheating, which netted the cheaters more than $20 million, occurred on two of the Internet's most popular sites, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The two sites operate out of a shopping mall in Costa Rica and run their games on computer servers housed on an Indian reservation outside of Montreal. They are licensed by a Mohawk tribe that has no background in casino gambling, a tribe that previously made the majority of its money selling tax-free tobacco. Though such gambling is illegal in both Canada and the U.S., the betting laws in those countries have no jurisdiction on the sovereign reservation.