WSOP.com might be keeping confiscated cheater money, censors messages on their support forum about it

[Dan Druff]

Bill's response:

First off, let's get some facts out of the way.

The reason your message was moderated/deleted is because you keep bringing up the same issue over and over again. I've given you the best answer I can give you and you started arguing with the answer. I told you that I could no longer discuss this issue with you online without violating one or more parties' privacy and you called that BS and demanded we hash this out in public.

Let's just go through this:

Here's why we're being cheated by WSOP.com:

3 weeks ago, I discovered 5 colluders at the sit and go tables on wsop.com which is no big deal since there will always be cheaters. I reported them to support with extensive evidence. They continued to play together for an additional 4 or 5 days after my initial email despite my additional evidence and pleas for them to perform a preliminary investigation to freeze their accounts.

Part of the reason it is difficult to have a conversation about this is that you keep bringing up the same things, even after they've been addressed.

I've already told you that we take allegations of cheating very seriously. We took some time to do a thorough investigation. Your "evidence" has to be corroborated.

Believe me, we get tons of cranks who claim this or that guy is cheating simply because they want them banned or they lost money to the guy.

You wouldn't like it if we just yanked your account whenever someone claimed to that you were cheating, would you? You would want us to to do some research and validate that there's reason to believe that you may be cheating, right?

Now, I can apologize that it wasn't handled at the speed that you would like but other than that, I don't know why you feel the need to keep bringing it up.

I didn't expect WSOP.com to have the same exact policy, but I was shocked to discover it is the quite the opposite. In order to protect the "privacy" of the accused, they do not provide the accuser a brief summary of the results of the investigation. They do not refund us anything and they keep the frozen funds of the banned players for themselves. We are not only being cheated by the colluders, we are being cheated by the site itself.

This is why I have refused to discuss this with you in public. You were told by our fraud team some of the financial details as they pertain to any money owed or not owed to you. I can't say anything else on this without violating both your privacy as well as the privacy of those who were caught.

So you know:

1. The colluders were caught.

2. What your financial resolution is.

What else can we provide?

I'm more than willing to have a discussion with someone but I'm not going to be harassed or allow you to hijack threads in the WSOP support forums. That's why you were banned.

Pretty harsh, right?

The 2+2 users weren't happy with this nasty/evasive answer, so a guy named 39suited posted this:

Is it correct that OP and other players affected do not get any refund from the games with collusion as stated in this thread? If this is indeed the case, can you provide us a reason why?

Bill simply responded: "OP has been informed why."

Wow.

And that was it. No more Bill Rini in the thread.

This is pretty outrageous.

Bill can't hide behind "player privacy" or "you don't know this particular situation" BS. That's the type of crap Lock Poker would say when avoiding payout questions.

He can definitely provide a general policy for WSOP.com regarding confiscated money, but is refusing to do so.

As correctly pointed out on 2+2, if a Sit-N-Go pays 3 spots and the top 3 are all cheaters, it ends up with a zero prize pool!

This is incredibly shady, and Rini just comes off as a combination of out-of-touch, arrogant, and incompetent.

Expect lots more of this crap as long as this guy is in charge.

Someone else pointed out that this situation would actually give Adelson-funded opponents of online poker ammunition to claim people will get cheated by colluders. You would think that WSOP.com would take matters like this seriously and make sure that players know that all money won through cheating will be sent back to the affected victims, rather than kept by the site.

Even if this accuser is full of shit and isn't telling us the whole story, Rini's response is very troubling.