Top 9 Incredible Poker Scams

25 Oct 2024

Cheating in poker is as old as the game itself. Cash games and tournaments have become bigger and better with huge amounts of money to be won. Such conditions create a perfect hunting ground for scammers and cheaters. Not all players try to win money in a fair game. Some of them discovered pretty successful ways to scam poker players. I have already made videos in the past where I covered 17 different poker scams, so make sure to check them out in the description. So, moving on, here are 9 more poker scams that rocked the poker industry. 

#1: Billy the Egyptian

In 2018, police got called to the Arla Casino in Glasgow by several angry poker players who accused an individual by the moniker Billy the Egyptian of using a tiny camera to read an electronically marked deck of cards. The Egyptian, a known player, was in cahoots with a croupier, scamming other players at his table. For this scheme to work, the croupier needs to place the deck on the table on its own for a short period of time. 

The precise details of the scam are unknown, but one possibility involving collusion of the croupier and a player is a deck of electronically marked cards which sends signals to a tiny mobile phone camera. It then sends a signal to the second mobile device which feeds an earpiece. The device can tell which cards are at the top of the deck when it's placed on the table. They can also predict which one of the players at the table will have the strongest hands based on the information transmitted. 

If this story sounds somewhat familiar, that's because it resembles the more recent Mike Postle cheating scandal. Mike Postle was accused of having access to players' whole card information by somehow exploiting the RFID technology in the cards used to stream the game in real-time. 

#2: Peter Jeppsen

In 2019, high-stakes pro Peter Jeppsen was found guilty of cheating at online poker by a Copenhagen city court. A well-known high-stakes online player with success predating Black Friday received more than two years behind bars and a €3.5 million fine for a six-year cheating spree that involved Jeppsen installing malware on other players' computers. 

He would gain access to their laptops and install the software. Once installed, he would have access to their whole cards. After complaints from several players, the Danish authorities launched a five-year investigation and trial. During the trial, there were three witnesses that testified that they were involved in the scam. The two men and a woman that testified admitted that they were involved in installing the software that Peter Jeppsen used. 

Along with the jail time and a seven-figure fine, the government confiscated almost $3.9 million from Jeppsen, roughly the amount that he won from his opponents, using an unfair advantage. At one point, he also held a record for the biggest online poker pot won after taking $499,000 from Tom Duan during a $501k No-Limit Hold’em session back in 2008. Victor Blom aka Isildur1 was among other victims who apparently faced Jeppsen during the years he was suspected of running his Trojan plan. 

#3: Darren «DooshKam» Woods

Playing under the alias «DooshKam», Darren Woods perpetrated an online poker scheme from 2007 to 2012 where he would use a VPN service to create multiple accounts on gambling sites and manipulate them. Darren Woods used his status in the poker community to his advantage. He was first exposed in September of 2011 by Feruell, a fellow TwoPlusTwo player, who was contacted by Darren, an 888Poker sponsored player, and given a rakeback deal. 

Woods was also regarded as a skilled poker player who mostly competes in high-stakes, fixed-limit hold'em games. He was good enough to supply tutorial videos to many poker sites. When Feruell viewed one of Woods' training videos and discovered that he was Woods' opponent in the lesson, he became skeptical of him. 

When searching up the game's records online, it was discovered that Woods had used a different screen name during that session than his normal one, which is a significant red flag because players are only permitted to have only one account. 

Darren Woods was found guilty of essentially rigging online poker games by using a number of different identities in order to play on several accounts at once. He had set up computers in such a way so as to disguise their location from the poker rooms making it look like all of the accounts were completely different people. Woods got charged with 13 counts of fraud and got sentenced to 15 months with the caveat that if he did not pay 1 million euros in restitution, he would get another 6 years added to his sentence. 

#4: Men the Master

It's hard to overlook men-win's accomplishments as a tournament poker player but it's equally as hard to overlook the numerous cheating acquisitions that followed Men the Master wherever he went. Once you dig below the surface of men's accomplishments, you end up uncovering some pretty nasty and damning evidence of foul play, precisely how much it is to be believed is open to discussion. If he wasn't slow-rolling people at the 2008 World Poker Open, then he is being verbally abusive to the dealers at the table. 

Daniel Negranu had openly called Men a cheater and Justin Bonomo had made even stronger claims. According to Justin Bonomo, in the early 2000s, at the Commerce Casino in LA, Men and a few of his horses were in their hotel room when the fire alarm went off. When the casino investigated the fire, they found tournament chips in the room. Part of the cheating allegations, particularly the team play allegations, stem from Men's huge stable of Vietnamese horses. 

And this dynamic not only leads itself to the temptations of collusive play, but also raises alarms in other people's minds whether cheating is happening or not. One of the allegations leveled against Men when, in the past, is that he would set up certain rules that his backed-up players must follow in a cash game. 

One of those rules was that if a staked player and Men were involved in a hand together, then the staked player must fold if Men raises him, no matter what the player has in his hand, even if it's the absolute nuts. Despite the allegations as well as being one of the most hated people in poker, Men Nguyen was still inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame and is still welcome in card rooms across the world.

#5: Brad Booth & Doug Poulk

Brad Booth was one of the top online poker players during the poker boom and considered one of the most fearless poker players in the mid-2000s. However, in 2012, he was caught in a poker scandal that involved Doug Polk. According to a post made by Doug Polk in TwoPlusTwo forum, Brad Booth was looking to get back into online poker and needed a transfer at Lock Poker. 

A friend of Polk's said Booth had been playing at the win and had at least $50,000 on him. Doug Polk first sent Brad $13,000 which he received in cash the next day from Booth. But from then on, things got very wrong. Brad then inquired as to whether he might obtain a larger amount from Doug. With the initial transfer going well, it appeared to be a safer bet. Brad requested $30,000 which Doug Polk sent him online. 

Several days later, when they met up to reach an agreement on when to transfer the money, Brad told Doug that he had a lot of debts and was out of cash at the moment. Doug assured Brad that they could work things out if he kept in touch and made small payments over time. Brad agreed and sent $2,200 to Doug the next week.

 However, after the first payment, Brad Booth changed his phone number and left the country and started to completely ignore Doug. Brad Booth has been through the ringer in his poker career but he also built up a very suspect reputation among his peers, a reputation, it seems, that too many people are still unaware of. 

Booth was the man during the poker boom regularly playing in the highest-stakes games online at Ultimate Bet Poker which may have made him one of the prime targets of the site's super users who fleeced Booth for somewhere between a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars depending on who you ask. After this, Brad's game was in shambles and he took to borrowing money, shooting most of it playing online poker. After being mocked on TwoPlusTwo and on every other poker community, Brad decided to defuse the situation by releasing a YouTube video in which he admitted to owing Polk money and acknowledged that his previous behavior had been disgusting. 

Booth was virtually silent and disappeared for the greater part of a decade after losing so much money and accruing debts. Brad was reported missing last year claiming to have gone on a camping trip. Finally, in September of last year, his family informed the poker world that he was still alive and well. Brad Booth's story is heartbreaking and it exemplifies how brutal poker can be when played recklessly.

#6: Bill Perkins

In May of 2020, Bill Perkins teased an alleged poker cheating scandal that would make Mike Puzzle's scandal look like a church service. The hedge fund manager offered basic details of the incident after leaving everyone on Twitter waiting overnight. Bill Perkins stated that he competed against recreational players in a private home game using a poker app or so he believed. He added in his cryptic statement that he caught anonymous pros using recreational player accounts but that he wasn't ready to reveal the identities. 

Despite the fact that most poker enthusiasts on social media chastised Perkins for exaggerating the incident, Jungleman was also criticized by numerous professionals. Daniel Cates later released a statement where he admitted to playing under the account of an unknown player, Sina Taleb. Cates claimed he played very few hands against Perkins in the game. He apologized for Bill Perkins getting caught in the crossfire of multiple pros ghosting recreational players. 

Cates also said that he doesn't think it's fair that he was being singled out since others did the same thing. In his statement, Cates wrote that he holds himself to a high standard of ethics but says he sometimes makes mistakes and apologized for his actions. This is not the first time Cates has been accused of playing on someone else's account. 

In 2011, it was learned that Daniel Cates along with Hasib Qureshi helped Jose Macedo win a sponsorship prize from Lock Poker. Cates admitted to using Jose's account to win money for a Lockpoker challenge including winning $43,000 from US pro Tyler Smith who had clearly stated that he had no interest in playing Cates.

#7: Sorel Mizzi

Italian poker pro Sorel Mizzi first became embroiled with the long arm of poker law in 2007 when he received a life ban from the then-poker giants FullTilt Poker when he took over the account of a friend and their tag teaming, which is against the rules, saw them win an amazing double of the FullTilt Poker $1M Guaranteed tournament and the next weekend the PokerStars Sunday $1M Guaranteed event where Mizzi had negotiated a share of the winnings. However, they were not successful and eventually got nothing as the entire winnings on FullTilt Poker was confiscated then redistributed. 

Sorel Mizzi received a life ban from FullTilt as a result of this breach. But in 2008, he was discovered to be multi-accounting and once again drew the wrath of the poker community. He was accused of letting a friend use his account when he said he had to leave for a flight and was deep in a tournament. He was banned by PokerStars for three months due to this. 

Less than two months after being named Bluff Magazine's Player of the Year in 2010, Sorel Mizzi was at the center of a cheating dispute between himself and 2010 WSOP Main Event runner-up John Reisner. Shaun Deeb in a TwoPlusTwo post said that Mizzi cheated Reisner out of several thousand dollars at the PCA. It was Sorel Mizzi who urged Reisner to play Chinese poker with him. He also incorporated several modifications such as use of a joker and a point system. 

Reisner noticed that Mizzi was actually leaving the two bottom cards untouched as he shuffled. When Mizzi deals the cards, he tosses the bottom card onto his deck. Reisner, upon noticing this, insists upon getting the deck which Mizzi dealt himself. The latter promptly blew up and said that it's his hand, his deal. Of course, Reisner took Mizzi's deck and turned up the last card to reveal the joker. Reisner was at the losing end at that point but he told Mizzi that he would not pay on account of Mizzi being a cheating scumbag. 

Reisner said that Mizzi had been literally crying to him to keep this quiet via text messages and phone calls, and that Mizzi even offered him a piece of his tournament action to keep this under wraps. Mizzi responded on TwoPlusTwo forum with a post of his own essentially denying any acquisitions of cheating, calling them absurd and far-fetched. 

In the 2015 WCOOP, Sorel Mizzi made the final table while sitting in his apartment in the United States. The problem was that PokerStars did not allow US players to play on PokerStars.com at that point. 

Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is that one of his best friends Rory Brown also final tabled the event and Sorel Mizzi spoke with him about strategy in the final table and also offered to help him out before the final table started. Rory Brown at that time did not know that Mizzi was also playing in the tournament from another account. Mizzi admitted to the rule violations while on Joey Ingram's podcast and said that he really wanted to play the WCOOP main event so he used someone else's account using a VPN.

#8: Jean-Paul Pasqualini & Cedric Rossi

In 2009, two French players, Jean-Paul Pasqualini and Cedric Rossi, competed in the Partouche Poker Tour and won 1st and 2nd place. However, an inquiry took place after it was alleged that they had cheated using subtle hand signals to communicate what cards each held. This gave them an edge over the other players and allowed them to win millions of dollars each. 

That's how players share information about cards. They use various gestures, mimics and sounds to designate each card. However, the perfect plan to cheat at the Partouche Poker Tour was ruined by CCTV cameras. As a result, Jean-Paul Pasqualini and Cedric Rossi were removed from the Global Poker Index rankings. Also, the duo received a life ban from participating in poker events. 

#9: Max «Maximilian A» Ashkar

In 2011, the online poker world broke out during the EM Championship in Austria when an Austrian and Swiss player reported that a German player whose site is in London had installed a Trojan virus on their laptops, making their whole cards visible when playing against them online. The two players confronted the scammer in a hotel room during the poker event, who then confessed to the fraud. 

Later, however, the player was referred to as «Maximilian A». in the official reports denied any involvement in the scam to the police. According to information from TwoPlusTwo, Maximilian A is actually Max Ashkar, a regular player at the high-stakes tables under the screen name Max86. 

Although the assumed number of his victims is much higher (around a dozen). His total winnings acquired by fraud can be over $2 million. Max Ashkar is likely to have used a simple USB drive to install the virus in a couple of seconds on the laptops of high-stakes players who had let him use their machines during live events or parties.