What would you do?

I've had a pretty amazing experience with the small Poker Site that I have been with almost since their inception 3 years ago. It either involves fraud or incompetence or both. I'm not sure; but would be interested in hearing what others would do.


But first, it is Thursday so there must have been a MOOOOOOOOOOOOOKKKKKKKKK last night. I did get to a Walgreens and got a Visa Card so that I was able to play. 72 runners and I did get to the final table. I was on the bad end of two big hands where my AQ didn't outrace eventual champion RecessRampage's pocket pair and the real big one where my KQ on K24 board didn't finish the deal against IronGirls Q9 when she rivered a flush. Isn't it funny how I remember those and hardly recall rivering and Ace on BuddyDank's QQ. Anyway, I finished 4th so I can't be too unhappy about that. OK, I am; but I'll get over it.


Nice win for Alan in a long, heated battle over Wes which was more like a game of catch as they just kept throwing chips back and forth in an almost 40 minute HU match. BTW, we already know of Wes's great blog; but if you haven't had the chance to get over to RecessRampage's blog, stop right here and go read his blog. Truly, some great stuff.

Now for the topic of the day. What would do?

As I've mentioned before, among the poker sites that I play, there is a small site that I play. I originally started due to the enormous overlay for a WSOP satellite and it was also one of the first sites that I played. Fast forward to last week. I went into the cashier and financial history and noticed that there were 3 transactions of transfers to another account. They only totaled $12 and I was unsure if they were truly successful transactions. I don't get to this site very often and I was unsure of the exact balance that should be in there. I made a number of calls to their support and ultimately they did nothing saying that they don't know passwords and it is the responsibility of the player to keep their system and password protected. Obviously, I did not like that response. So for now (or should I say then), the only thing I did was change my password and make it where it did not automatically log on (which I have now done for all of my sites). Bill Rini wrote about this stuff a while ago and like the big dummy that I am, I really did not heed any of his warnings.

A week goes by without anything suspect so I'm thinking everything OK. I couldn't be more wrong. This week while checking my email, I got an email from the site saying that they have received my request for a DEPOSIT. HUH??? I did not make a deposit. The request was for something like $500. Next email, We have received your request for WITHDRAWAL. WHAT!!!!!! This request for $1000. I immediately called them and had them disable my account until I could get home and investigate further because I was not getting anywhere with them on resolving the problem.

I get home and give them a call. Looking at my history, there were actually 4 requests for withdrawals. They were all denied because they were trying to withdraw to a Neteller account. Of course, I am a US citizen and they were all denied because of this; but that is beside the point as there is obviously some fraudulent stuff going on here. I was really getting nowhere with the site as I could hardly understand them in the first place. The lady I was working with was pleasant; but just didn't seem to have a handle of the urgency or seriousness of this issue.

Now, here is the added kicker. I have about $1000 in this account. When I got home and finally got my account re-enabled, I saw over $2200 in my account. I repeatedly told them this isn't correct. I had two concerns. That this money belonged to somebody else or that there was a glitch in the system as she told me the deposits were via "Automatic Deposits" which is another way of saying that they are deposits via winnings at the poker tables. Another possibility is that somebody was using my account as middleman. Putting deposits into my account and then trying to withdraw them. I discounted that theory after my talks with support. This was my 3rd phone call of the day and we left it at that would check their system for any problems.

I called for the 4th time about an hour later. According to them, the only activity on my account in the last 60 days was from the same IP address that I had used the prior day which makes thing even more confusing. After talking with my brother, he says it is possible to "spoof" an IP address. They also said or confirmed that there was nothing wrong with there system and that everything looked legit. After many back and forths, I finally ended it with.... "OK, for the last time, you are saying that you see nothing wrong with your system".. this is after repeated efforts of telling them that I shouldn't have that much money in my account. They said "Yes, everything looks normal". Yikes!!!!!

So, I now have over $2200 dollars in my account. What would you do? I'll say what I have done so far below.

So many alarms are going off right now. I'm running spyware checks and doing everything that I can do confirm my security within my home network. I do use a router and have it encrypted so I would think that it wouldn't be easy to break through.. plus I haven't seen anything suspicious on any other stuff that I have on my computer; but I obviously still have my worries.

The person or persons doing the alleged fraud. They were trying to withdraw to a different Neteller account than the one I used and tried it repeatedly; however, he didn't change any other information on my account. You would think, that he would change email address or physical address or something if he/she were serious about stealing money. So something is fishy there as well.

So, what did I do? First off, I know that isn't my money so any thoughts of withdrawing that money didn't really ever have any serious intent. Somebody mentioned that they would withdraw it all for the reason of keeping it out of the hands of the suspected bad guy knowing that the excess money would have to be returned. In a backwards kind of way, it made sense. The thing that gets me is that as of 3 days later, the excess money is still in there. You would think that they at least have some sort of daily balancing and would have caught this by now. At the worst they have to be doing some sort of weekly or monthly balancing.

I obviously can't feel comfortable playing there any longer so what I did was made an immediate withdrawal request for my almost $1000 that I knew was mine. I changed my password again so we will see what happens.

Very, very strange.

Have a good weekend!!!!