September 23rd, 2008
Another online poker site caught cheating: UltimateBet
MSNBC outed Ultimate Bet last week as being under investigation for enabling certain users to cheat their regulars out of tens of millions of dollars. The cheat involved allowing certain customers were able to view the hole cards of opponents. Like other incidences of online poker fraud, this one was an inside job:
The company blamed the intrusion on “individuals … (who) worked for the previous ownership of UltimateBet prior to the sale of the business to Tokwiro in October 2006.”
It is interesting that the same people who are behind the code base that runs UltimateBet are also running a security start-up called Iovation, which basically claims to approximately identify end clients and provide a second authentication factor for fraud prevention. Hopefully the Iovation team will disclose their involvement in the UltimateBet fraud case.
Also, MSNBC, online poker drop in popularity may not be related to the discovery of cheating scandals on poker websites. It could just be that the poker fad has run its course. Correlation is not causation.
Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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