Sixty Minutes Expose, Not So Harsh: 4

One of the possible explanations behind this scandal was that there was someone in the online casinos that has administrative access and was able to see all the cards in any given game. The two websites were then fully put under investigation. During the Sixty Minutes interview, host Steve Kroft asked Serge Ravitch, "Somebody with access to a server, a computer server that would give that information to them in real time?" Kroft asked. "Yes," Ravitch replied. "So either a really good hacker or somebody on the inside?" Kroft asked. "Exactly," Ravitch replied. The host went into explicit details regarding the online casino scandal and how the detectives who posed as players actually were able to attain the hand histories of one of the main cheaters known as “Protripper” at the Absolute Poker website.

The detectives went on to make an Excel spreadsheet that contained 65,000 lines of data taken from the cheaters’ games at the online casino. This was one of the many pieces of evidence that allowed investigators to analyze the cheater’s activity. One gentleman that was interviewed by Kroft, Michael Josem, revealed how they were able to recreate hands that were played by the cheater and actually turned that into a video which they posted online for everyone to see. Along with the video he was able to post the statistical analysis of the cheater’s win rate. Josem went into detail about how they were able to graph the data and therefore prove that there was cheating going on at the online casinos. Josem said, "We did the mathematical analysis to find that they were winning at about 15 standard deviations above the mean, which is approximately equivalent to winning a one-in-a-million jackpot six consecutive times. Now, this sort of stuff just doesn't happen in the real world."

The online casino scandal’s most important piece of evidence was probably the Excel spreadsheet that was created with the cheater’s data mostly due to the fact that the user’s IP address was listed on the document. The IP address was traced back to that of a person that worked at Absolute Poker. The Costa Rica based company finally admitted after a thorough investigation that a former employee of theirs hacked into their system. The former employee of the online casino broke the code of the program and therefore was able to look at all of the players cards as he played. The cheater’s identity is being protected due to a deal that this person struck with Absolute Poker and the authorities. Part of the deal was a full confession and detailed description of how he did it.