back to article Online casinos hit by bot armies

Botnets are fulfilling law enforcement fears that online casinos could prove fertile ground for money laundering, according to a recent, little-noticed report by risk compliance firm Fortent. Some are engaging in variations of an old casino scam, in which preprogrammed-to-lose bots transfer dirty money - obtained through stolen …

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  1. Joshua Sugarman
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    Not good news for poker!

    I'm a regular online poker player at fulltilt and though collusion (in a form of cheating) obviously takes place in small doses, the recent news article of bot nets connecting in performing attacks is increasingly worrying!

    After all, a botnet would mean the users have different IP Addresses etc and so much harder to detect. To know that fulltilt failed to discover this as it happened means I'm more inclined to leave.. or maybe to give online poker a break until this is secured again!

  2. Joe K

    Errrrr.

    USA today? A quote in dollars?

    I thought online gambling in the land of the "free" was punishable by death now, naughty journos.

    So thats about £1.5mil a year? A nanoscopic drop in the ocean. Wouldn't even keep Kerry Packer in socks for a year.

  3. Eduard Coli

    Odds are against it

    No offense to other posters here but how gullible and naive do you have to believe that anything in an online "poker" game is random. Some of them don't even call it gambling but rather online entertainment. You have no real way of knowing if your opponent is a person or a bot and if they are making decisions by looking at your hand or if they are even real. The best you could hope for is something like a slot machine where the randomness is in the payout and not the play.

  4. Joshua Sugarman
    Thumb Up

    @Eduard Coli

    How gullible and naiive are you to think it's rigged :)

    Studies show that in the Bot v Player race, the player wins in the long run as the Bot makes the same decisions in the same places so can easily be played against. In depth scientific studies with the most advanced bots in the world showed this. It was even an article here on the register. So even if one bot is sat at the table, you'll only lose if you're bad player (in which you'd lose anyway....)

    As for "random". The sites are Governed and ensured that the algorithms indeed are completely random. There is no way anyone can disagree with that comment. A lot of people have a bad run at a site and think its purposly rigged, but what would the Poker Room's have to gain from that? They take money in the form of a rake so they want it nice and fair of course... Use some logic and try not call other people naiive just because you don't understand it!

    As for slot machines... That is a pure random luck game. Poker (Especially texas hold'em) has much more skill due to the reading of betting patterns and the mathematics of the game including equity, pot odds, implied odds, etc.... Once again if you don't know what these mean, you can't really argue about it...

    Online Poker has always been a fair and fun way of getting on the tables, on the internet... The ONLY danger is collusion. Methods such as monitoring IP Addresses help to get around collusion, but with a whole botnet doing it, that's the worrying thing. However, I'm still rather sure that this is an incredibly rare occurance.

  5. Nicholas Moore

    @Joshua Sugarman

    "The sites are Governed and ensured that the algorithms indeed are completely random"

    I'm going to presume you meant "pseudo-random" there. Unless the poker industry knows something most Computer Scientists/Mathematicians don't, of course.

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