PokerByProxy part deux?

[SrslySirius]

https://pokeram.com/

POKER AUTOMATICS is automatic system for gaining guaranteed passive income from online poker
24 hours per day 7 days a week without human participation.
You don’t need any experience or skill to play poker. Forget about risks!
Deal with your favorite things, enjoy life. And entrust money management to... robots!
Robots, which have being earning daily profit from online poker for more than 3 years.
Create an account, make a deposit and watch the sum in your account growing every day
without your participation.
Withdraw profits in any convenient way at any convenient time.

At a glance it looks like the same scammy idea.

[SrslySirius]

DJChaps is this true???

[BeerAndPoker]

Seems legit!

I can't wait to invest!

[haleylh]

Yep, same shit, different cover. Let's see if this one makes use of paid Fiverr speakers like the Poker by Proxy one did.

Noting that the text on the page you linked to appears to be polished Engrish, I'm gonna wager this one will also trace to India or someplace similar when defrocked.

[Dan Druff]

Pokeram was originally registered on GoDaddy (in 2004) by a George Benson.

Now it is registered on a UK site called internet.bs, and the registrant info is hidden.

This change occurred on June 5, 2014.

So unless George Benson sold the domain or let it expire (unlikely since he had it since 2004), he is the one behind this.

[Dan Druff]

Look at the shady "representatives" they signed up, including 2 in Nigeria.

https://pokeram.com/representatives

[Sanlmar]

DJChaps is this true???

Chaps is that you?

Srsly! Someone needs to do a split screen with this guy & Chaps shoots vid.

They say everyone has a twin but this was ridiculous. Hands to lips (without the signature cigarette) the works.

[SrslySirius]

Meet Shimmy. He's been using Poker Automatics for a few months and is a very satisfied customer.



As it so happens, he's also a fan of Adrian Fenix, one of the more popular poker streamers. Shimmy was kind enough to give Adrian his own ridiculous testimonial:

[haleylh]

I spent several hours yesterday looking into this, and I'm now not quite as sure that this is exactly the same as the Poker by Proxy scam. It is indeed a scam, and it is indeed aimed at the HYIP community, but it may also be the actual front for a large-scale poker bot operation, just as it proclaims to be... not that that makes the whole scheme any more legitimate.

Let's put it this way: Based on various forum reports, there are hundreds or thousands of bots playing on the world's poker networks at micro and low stakes. What's the risk to running a bot? Easy: Account seizure and forfeiture of bankroll. So what's the solution to that? Getting other people to fund that bankroll. That's where an operation like Poker Automatics comes in, and why this actually makes some sense in a sick sort of way.

I hate to say this, but if one compares Poker by Proxy to the new Poker Automatics, then the things that are different about this latest scam are exactly the weakest points of the old scammy operation -- as if this was a giant Version 2.0 of the whole thing, fixing the most blatant foul-ups of the last fraud effort. This one also seems to have a lot more Russian involvement behind the scenes, particular regarding the pump-n-dump routines on the HYIP forums.

I've ID'd at least seven of the fake testimonials as coming from Fiverr account posters, though there must be some similar services out there that are also being used as part of this. I need to figure out who these competing gig services are and ID some more of the fake testimonial providers.

[Dan Druff]

Does anyone understand how this works?

Are the PokerAutomatic people running the bots and you're just trusting them to pay you if they win? (LOL if true)

Or are you given the bots and run them yourself?

Or is it a middle ground, where they create accounts in your name and run the bots for you, while you can open the software and watch them play?

I suppose this might be a clever idea if they could essentially get non-poker people to sign up for bogus accounts, so they have hundreds/thousands of accounts to bot with. That makes it a lot tougher to detect. They could even have these bots colluding with one another. Kind of like a DDoS version of botting.

Perhaps one of us should make a phony account there and inquire about how all of it works.

I wonder why the testimonials are from Fiverr people, though. If this really works (even if against the poker sites' TOS), why aren't they getting actual customers to get on camera and sing its praises?

And what about this Shimmy guy, who seems to have some legitimate poker fandom of one of those Twitch poker players?

[haleylh]

Does anyone understand how this works?

Are the PokerAutomatic people running the bots and you're just trusting them to pay you if they win? (LOL if true)

Or are you given the bots and run them yourself?

Or is it a middle ground, where they create accounts in your name and run the bots for you, while you can open the software and watch them play?

I suppose this might be a clever idea if they could essentially get non-poker people to sign up for bogus accounts, so they have hundreds/thousands of accounts to bot with. That makes it a lot tougher to detect. They could even have these bots colluding with one another. Kind of like a DDoS version of botting.

Perhaps one of us should make a phony account there and inquire about how all of it works.

I wonder why the testimonials are from Fiverr people, though. If this really works (even if against the poker sites' TOS), why aren't they getting actual customers to get on camera and sing its praises?

And what about this Shimmy guy, who seems to have some legitimate poker fandom of one of those Twitch poker players?

It's definitely a scam. I'm just not totally sure which type of scam it is. It's about 90% that it's just another HYIP scam, like Poker by Proxy was, but this version is something like PBP on steroids -- lots more testimonials and claimed posts of payouts that are stretching like six months back already. The other 10% chance is that the bot network does exist in some form, and the operators are just using this to get their own money out and replace it with that of their "investors," who would be the ones to forfeit their bankrolls if the bots are ever blocked en masse.

The "Shimmy" thing: There are at least two different UK Shimmy peeps. One is a Twitch fan and poker player, but isn't the same Shimmy who sells fake testimonials on Fiverr.

I've ID'd eight of the 25 testimonials on the Poker Automatics site as being provided by Fiverr gig vendors. That means that all of the testimonials are indeed fake, because you wouldn't mix in that many fake ones if all the others were real. The others probably came from other web sites, as I'd surmised.

[Sanlmar]

What is HYIP an acronym for?

[smithbk]

What is HYIP an acronym for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-yi...stment_program

[haleylh]

What is HYIP an acronym for?

HYIP = High Yield Investment Program.

The thread where this baby was floated is here.

[Dan Druff]

Does anyone understand how this works?

Are the PokerAutomatic people running the bots and you're just trusting them to pay you if they win? (LOL if true)

Or are you given the bots and run them yourself?

Or is it a middle ground, where they create accounts in your name and run the bots for you, while you can open the software and watch them play?

I suppose this might be a clever idea if they could essentially get non-poker people to sign up for bogus accounts, so they have hundreds/thousands of accounts to bot with. That makes it a lot tougher to detect. They could even have these bots colluding with one another. Kind of like a DDoS version of botting.

Perhaps one of us should make a phony account there and inquire about how all of it works.

I wonder why the testimonials are from Fiverr people, though. If this really works (even if against the poker sites' TOS), why aren't they getting actual customers to get on camera and sing its praises?

And what about this Shimmy guy, who seems to have some legitimate poker fandom of one of those Twitch poker players?

It's definitely a scam. I'm just not totally sure which type of scam it is. It's about 90% that it's just another HYIP scam, like Poker by Proxy was, but this version is something like PBP on steroids -- lots more testimonials and claimed posts of payouts that are stretching like six months back already. The other 10% chance is that the bot network does exist in some form, and the operators are just using this to get their own money out and replace it with that of their "investors," who would be the ones to forfeit their bankrolls if the bots are ever blocked en masse.

The "Shimmy" thing: There are at least two different UK Shimmy peeps. One is a Twitch fan and poker player, but isn't the same Shimmy who sells fake testimonials on Fiverr.

I've ID'd eight of the 25 testimonials on the Poker Automatics site as being provided by Fiverr gig vendors. That means that all of the testimonials are indeed fake, because you wouldn't mix in that many fake ones if all the others were real. The others probably came from other web sites, as I'd surmised.

So I just looked at that thread on moneymakergroup.com, and it's 228 pages long, mostly of people reporting payouts of somewhere between $0.20 and $1.50.

Unless these are all bogus accounts on moneymakergroup, I'm guessing the scam involves making these micropayments for some time, creating good word of mouth, and then eventually running off with the remaining money when a desired level of ill-gotten gains is achieved.

I see they also have an affiliate program which looks like multi-level marketing, as well.

There are 2 options of affiliate program: for ordinary members and Representatives.

For ordinary members:
5% of the profits of your 1st level partners
2% of the profits of your 2nd level partners
1% of the profit of your 3rd level partners

For Representatives:
10% of the profits of your 1st level partners
3% of the profits of your 2nd level partners
2% of the profits of your 3rd level partners

Also, do you know if you can withdraw your original "contribution", or is that considered an investment that you don't get back?

[SrslySirius]

So I just looked at that thread on moneymakergroup.com, and it's 228 pages long, mostly of people reporting payouts of somewhere between $0.20 and $1.50.

Unless these are all bogus accounts on moneymakergroup, I'm guessing the scam involves making these micropayments for some time, creating good word of mouth, and then eventually running off with the remaining money when a desired level of ill-gotten gains is achieved.

Correct. There is no bot network, just like there were no poker players on PokerByProxy. It is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The guys at moneymakergroup are well aware of this, but they don't care because well-run Ponzis actually pay out early investors. Their strategy is to get in and out quickly before the whole thing collapses.

Would this work in pool? Go to pool halls looking for hustlers, win the first few games at low stakes, then bail when the hustler tries to raise the stakes.

[BeerAndPoker]

I looked at the graph for LOLs and I can't see this "system of bots" having a losing day in the past 6 months which is as far back as I went. I remember the PokerByProxy would have a losing day or two a month then if I'm not mistaken it went bust one day when they finally close up shop.

This has a whole lot of testimonials when you look at there twitter account so I'm sure these people profited something (maybe just a five spot) it's just the other hundreds or thousands that will be stolen from eventually that will be out money.

[Dan Druff]

I looked at the graph for LOLs and I can't see this "system of bots" having a losing day in the past 6 months which is as far back as I went. I remember the PokerByProxy would have a losing day or two a month then if I'm not mistaken it went bust one day when they finally close up shop.

This has a whole lot of testimonials when you look at there twitter account so I'm sure these people profited something (maybe just a five spot) it's just the other hundreds or thousands that will be stolen from eventually that will be out money.

The funny thing about PokerByProxy was that their losing days were in such a perfect pattern that it was probably like 1 in a billion for it to actually land that way over a period of months.

But this is even dumber -- bots that win for over 180 days straight?

Too bad George Benson is such a common name, because I think there's a good chance that's the name of the guy behind this scam.

[haleylh]

Weird, this wormhole keeps getting wider the deeper I dig. Right now I don't know quite what the eff to make of it all, but if this is just a simple Ponzi scheme, someone has gone to an awful lot of detailed work to make it seem like it actually is what it claims to be.

For anyone who wants to take a few minutes, take a look at this FAQ page, and actually read for context some of the stuff that's been written:

https://pokeram.com/faq

Whoever wrote that knows more than a little bit about online poker.

Or take a look at this page of "representatives":

https://pokeram.com/representatives

I looked into a lot of those e-mail addys and Skype contacts: Some are clearly throwaways, but others cross-reference repeatedly to other HYIP and MMG schemes and sites, meaning that if they're suckers, they've been part of this for quite a while already.

And then there's stuff like this:

https://twitter.com/PokerAutomatics

This Twitter account was created on July 21st of last year with a dump of a couple of hundred posts, and it's been updated daily sense. That correlates rather neatly to when that 229-page thread on the HYIP forum that's linked higher up was started. And 24,000 followers?? I looked into them and they appear to be largely Russian-language fakes, but a lot of sites like this buy fake Twitter and Facebook followers.

Just like some of those testimonials are paid fakes, for sure as well, though most of the known fakes are English-language, whereas the site's origins appear to be Russian/Croatian and Indonesian.

There are probably a dozen other pages on that site that show the same attention to detail as the links I've posted, plus other social-network outposts. The thing is, if this is indeed a Ponzi (and that's still the betting favorite), several someones have put in a fuck of a lot of effort to make it look "legit". It's all just really strange and I haven't got it figured out yet.

[BeerAndPoker]

^^^- yeah when I posted I said they got paid as in as little as a $5 spot hinting that I wouldn't be surprised if they were hired "fake" testimonial ads from a place like fiverr.com.

People will say anything for a few bucks and just state a first name that might or might not even be their true first name. If they aren't extremely known online or aren't outed by people who do know them then nobody is going to put anything together just off some two minutes or less of praising a company off a note sheet they were given to do so.