'60 Minutes': How online poker cheating works Video

'60 Minutes': How online poker cheating works Video Transcript

>> How did the cheaters pull it off?

>> The cheaters apparently pulled it off through having access to the mind servers of the computers, with no regulatory oversight. And so they were able to access the administrative parts of the software, without anyone looking over their shoulder. And so -

>> And do it in real time.

>> And they were able to look at the cards while they were happening.

>> Late last year, the poker sleuths got lucky. When one of the players requested the hand histories of a suspected cheater known as Pot Ripper, someone at Absolute Poker inadvertently sent them an Excel spreadsheet with sixty five thousand lines of data, that include all of the cards that had been played in thousands of games, against hundreds of Pot Ripper's opponents. It allowed Michael Josum [assumed spelling], an Australian computer security expert, to recreate some of the hands as the cheater would have seen them, and turn them into a video, which he posted online, along with a statistical analysis of the cheater's win rate.

>> Well it appears we have a whole lot of people in the middle, which is pretty normal. They lose a bit, or they win a bit, a few people have got lucky for a bit, a few people were losing a lot of money. Right up here in the very top right hand corner we have the cheater. We did the mathematical analysis to find out they were winning at about fifteen standard deviations above the mean, which is approximately equivalent to winning a one in a million jackpot six consecutive times. Now this sort of stuff just doesn't happen in the real world.

>> But more importantly, the Excel spreadsheet also listed the user account and the IP address of the suspected cheater, which the sleuths traced to the computer modem of an Absolute Poker employee. The company, which is headquartered in this shopping mall in Costa Rica, was finally forced to acknowledge that a former employee had cracked their software code, and cheated online players by looking at their cards. But what really made the victims angry was that Absolute Poker cut a deal with the cheater to protect his identity in exchange for a full confession of how he did it. ^M00:02:02 [ ticking ]