A ten year-old the multi-million dollar Ultimatebet hole card cheating scandal has resurrected over the weekend with the tapes being released onto the internet implying to record a discussion on the cheating software between lawyers and Ultimatebet executives including the now notorious Russ Hamilton .
Allegedly former Hamilton associate Travis Makar is to be blamed for releasing the tape, said to date from 2008, where Hamilton admits in a secretly recorded meeting that he manipulated the online poker software for advantage. A summary put up on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XrnmyWu1vS0 contents admissions of taking money from players, along with assertions that there was no intention to compensate them.
The discovery of the cheating was exposed thanks to experienced players' detective work, and the tapes reveal an exchange of opinion between Ultimate Bet attorneys Sanford Millar and Daniel Friedburg, along with one of the UB founders, Greg Pierson.
An inspired player even presented a series of cliff notes:
2:55--Russ Hamilton: "Annie Duke regularly used [God-mode software] on a 15 minute delay"
5:07--Russ Hamilton: "I did take this money & I'm not trying to make it right ... so let's get that out of the way"
6:30--Russ Hamilton claims he spread his ill-gotten gains to high stakes players: "Freddy Deeb got the most cash."
8:20--Russ Hamilton justifies his fraud by claiming he used it to pump up UB: "I spent a lot of this money on [UB promotions]."
8:30 to end: UB exec suggests some of Russ Hamilton's cheating was "sanctioned" by management to help UB survive a financially difficult period.
9:00 to end: UB exec suggest shifting blame/liability for fraud to software developer Excapsa
The appearance of the name of former Cereus COO Paul Leggett, recently appointed to head online gaming activities for the Amaya Gaming group, could bear consequences for Amaya's ambitions to enter the legalised US poker market through its Ongame Poker Network subsidiary.
Perhaps consequently, the first US legal online poker enterprise, the Nevada-licensed Ultimate Poker, announced discontinuity of the use of the online fraud prevention company Iovation, which it claims was a contracted entity with no access to its software.
"We understand that there were concerns among some of our customers, we hope this makes our players feel more comfortable,” they said in the statement.
It seems that the main concern over Iovation is that it was founded post-Ultimatebet by Greg Pierson, and Ultimate Poker claimed that other than this, they had no links with the former Ultimatebet.
Iovation also serves CAMS, a subsidiary of online risk management group Verifi which provides ID verification and geolocation facilities to Ultimate Poker. Whether this new development will it attract the attention of the Nevada regulators who have approved Verifi-CAMS, remains to be seen.
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