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Well-known poker gambling site Absolute Poker has its name associated with an online poker fraud case. Actually, the investigations were started by the online poker site together with the authorities from the Mohawk Indian territory in Quebec. The online poker site is a successful gambling business with a history beginning in 2003, operating in Costa Rica and licensed by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission

The suspicion that their online poker games were rigged started when Marco Johnson, 21, of Las Vegas send an email a month ago asking for a history of the cards he was dealt in a poker tournament in which he felt he was cheated.

"There were just too many odd hands at the final table and my friends thought I got scammed," Johnson said.

The poker gambling site sent him a document with the hand histories of all tournament poker players that participated in the tournament, along with their e-mail addresses and the IP address, this being more than he asked for. Johnson was not confident if the file, with information of all hands played at the entire 14 tables tournaments, was sent by mistake or released by an insider, and decided it’s best to pass it on. This was the thing that triggered the investigation.

Johnson discussed the hands played in the tournaments with friends who are also internet poker players and other trusted people who are amateur poker players and spotted some interesting facts. For example, one of the tournament poker players and also the winner of the tournament, with the user Potripper was in general making bad decisions on his game, such as wagering a large sum on money on a 10 high.

Another interesting thing that was observed was that at each game played by Potripper a player with the user #363 was always present. The suspicious tournament poker player was not seen by other players, only he or she could likely see their hands. More than this, whenever the user #363 was in the game, Potripper did not fold for stretches as long as a half hour. This is a rare occurence for a poker player in a Texas Hold'em poker game. When checking the IP addresses list of the tournament poker players it came out that #363's IP address originated from where are the offices of the online poker site Absolute Poker.

After investigators researched more, they were led to company part-owner Scott Tom and the Potripper user account led to the company's former director of operations, AJ Ripper.

Official investigations say it may be a case of a poker fraud of between $500,000 and $1 million in a period of around 2 weeks. One may think that such stories can hurt the online poker industry but being an industry estimated at $9 and $12 billion be sure that this will not affect it, possibly it will only squeeze a bit more on the security solutions.

The only one who will need to defend its name is the popular poker site, Absolute Poker who already announced the incident to its customers and has kept them updated with the audit in process.