Lookout for Online Poker Scams

You may think you’re sitting down to a game of friendly online poker, but beware! There are players who will try to steal your money by running online poker scams.

Most commonly executed at sit-and-go games. A player registers for the minimum amount and looks for an honest opponent willing to make a larger side bet. If the scammer wins, the honest opponent pays up. But if the honest opponent wins, the scammer ignores the side bet and doesn’t pay.

An opponent you have become familiar with one day asks to borrow a small sum of money and offers to pay you back double the next day. You go for it and, sure enough, the next day you get double your money back. This goes on sporadically over the next few weeks with the amounts gradually getting larger and larger. Unknown to you, the scammer is doing the same thing to others. Once there are enough victims, and the pool of money is large, he simply disappears taking all the money with him.

This scam doesn’t happen often but, when it does, people can lose a great deal of money. It starts when an online high roller chats up other high rollers asking to borrow large sums of money. When you are in the high roller club, everyone is pretty close knit. So it is not unlikely that one high roller may ask another to loan them $25,000 or more. The problem is, in this scam, the person asking for the money has had his online password compromised, and the money is actually being transferred to the control of someone pulling online poker scams instead.

It starts out innocently enough. A player on one site asks you to transfer money to his account on another site. He even offers you a profit to do it. And don’t worry; the player will give you the money you need to transfer, plus the profit, up front. Sounds too good to be true, so you do it. Next thing you know, your account and money are frozen and you are being investigated for participating in money laundering. Turns out the money you transferred was stolen from another player’s account and it looks like you were part of these online poker scams.