UB Scandal Review – Overview of Cheating and Impact

There are stories all over the internet about how a notorious hacker penetrated the various levels of security at Ultimate Bet and managed to steal tens of millions of dollars from unsuspecting players. While that much of the story is pretty accurate, there are hundreds of other crazy rumors out there that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some say that it was a conspiracy on behalf of company VP’s while others go as far as to claim that it was a secret organization that stole the money to fund terrorism. Here’s what really happened at Ultimate Bet during the scandal in 2004-2008.

Did someone really steal millions of dollars from UB players?

Yes. Although the person’s name was never released to the public, many speculate that it was a former Ultimate Bet employee that had external access to the UB servers. To make a long story short, in 2004 this person found a way to access the administrator rights of the server. This allowed him to see each player’s hole cards in real time, which is obviously a massive advantage. However, it is impossible for the administrator account to place wagers on the website, and the firewalls should have prevented the criminal to obtain this information remotely.

Somehow, this person managed to do exactly that. From there, the criminal simply created dozens of VIP accounts from 2004 to 2006 and used them in conjunction with the administrator rights. There were also others that were thought to be involved in the crime but no details were ever released to the public.

Wait….UB never said who this criminal was?

No, Ultimate Bet made an agreement with the hacker that they would not seek prosecution as long as he revealed exactly how he managed to infiltrate the UB servers from a remote location. While the company never made a formal statement as to why they let this person off so easy, it is believed that the crime itself was so complex that it was thought to be impossible. Remember, Ultimate Bet had security in place that rivaled any government agency or financial institution.

How did Ultimate Bet catch this person stealing?

Here’s where the conspiracy comes in at. Around the summer of 2004, several players began to complain on the forums that there were multiple cheaters at the higher stakes tables. None of them had any evidence, of course, but these accounts would place what seemed like absolutely ridiculous bets and they would somehow win every time. To make matters even worse, these same players said that whenever they did happen to catch a card on the river to give them the sure win these accounts would fold…every time.

So what did Ultimate Bet do when they read the forum complaints?

Considering that UB was supposed to be a truly unhackable server, at first they did very little. Representatives checked the hands in question and thought it looked a little bit off, but at the same time they could not fathom how such a scam could happen on an unhackable server. Add to the fact that there is always a fair share of sore losers at any virtual casino, and UB assumed that there was nothing to the complaints.

Over time, however, the complaints started becoming more frequent. Several players decided to take it upon themselves in the spring of 2006 to review some of the logs and calculate the statistics of the suspected accounts, and the results were clearly off the charts. One account in particular had such an impressive winning streak that it was the equivalent of winning a state lottery jackpot…three weeks in a row.

So surely Ultimate Bet stepped in then, didn’t they?

Here’s the thing….almost every society’s laws are based on the burden of proof. It clearly looked like these accounts were cheating, but there simply was no way that it was possible. In fact, an expert stated after reviewing UB’s software that even if someone was sitting at a terminal connected to the mainframe computer, they couldn’t do what these accounts did.

Ultimate Bet did, however, realize that there was a serious problem. Once they stepped back and looked at the entire picture, they realized that discovering what was happening could be eventually discovered by tracking the withdrawals. This is essentially how they discovered the ringleader behind the entire plot.

So what did Ultimate Bet do then?

In essence, they bent over and….well; I’d better not say that. Even before they were able to figure out how the cheating had occurred (which they still do not fully know, by the way), they decided to start refunding money to players that were subject to an unfair advantage because of cheaters.

In order to determine who was an actual victim, they sat down in front of their computers and started reviewing the previous hands played on UB; one by one. As you can imagine there were billions and billions of hands dealt over the course of several years, and to make matters worse the current ownership hadn’t been on the job for six months yet.

Eventually, the current owner sued the person he bought Ultimate Bet from for $75 million dollars. This made spectacular news headlines around the globe, and when the case landed within the Ontario Supreme Court you could almost hear a pin drop in the room as everyone awaited a verdict. A settlement of fifteen million dollars was granted to refund money back to the players.

So that’s it? Nobody went to jail or ended up fired?

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission thoroughly investigated the matter and confirmed that cheating had taken place from 2004 to 2006. Now remember, a new owner purchased the UB poker room in 2006 and he had no idea what he was inheriting. There’s absolutely no way that he could have foreseen what turned out to be the largest crime ever committed on the internet; and like we stated earlier, the system was deemed ultra secure by industry experts. The commission ended up fining Ultimate Bet $1.5 million dollars.

Has this ever happened on any other gaming website?

While I’d love to say “yes” or “no” to that question, there’s simply no way to answer that. Now, I can tell you that thousands of players have issued similar complaints at other online casinos, but at the same time their ownership chose to completely ignore the matter.

The only reason that we know what happened at Ultimate Bet was because they decided to tell on themselves. If they decided to ignore the allegations and not search through billions of previous hands to find a definitive answer, we still wouldn’t know if anything had happened or not.

So should I trust UB when I want to play online poker?

There are over 40 professional poker players that log into Ultimate Bet and wager high stakes every week. There are millions of casual and competitive players who do the exact same thing on the website, and you’d better believe that they wouldn’t be there if Ultimate Bet didn’t strive to do the right thing throughout the scandal.

It is also important to remember that even though the players were the initial victims to an ingenious cyber-hacker, Ultimate Bet refunded every penny of the stolen money. UB ended up being the only victim in all of this, but they are still the most popular gaming website on the net for a reason. Don’t forget to use our ub bonus code for a 111% first time deposit bonus.