This time, it’s a poker pro from Germany
He supposedly got $2 million off of his victims
Online poker is one of today’s most wide spread sports, and there are tens of millions of active players worldwide. Just take a look at one of the major online poker rooms, like PokerStars, and you will see at least a quarter of a million players being online at any given moment! Now, as you would expect, any group of people that reaches a number this high has to be a part of an extremely large demographic, and it is bound to contain its fair share of bad seeds.
That’s why, every now and then, you will see an online poker player (or even a live poker pro) involved in a scandal (or even the online poker rooms, if we remember Full Tilt Poker), with him accused of cheating, most of the times, although other accusations have been brought against top poker pros.
The latest news of online poker cheating comes from Germany, where one high stakes player was accused of cheating players out of $2 million over time. Unlike the infamous Girah scandal that captured our attention over the summer, this guy didn’t gain his victims’ trust and then used the information he collected from them to win the hands he was secretly being dealt in; instead, he took advantage of his victims by installing a Trojan virus on the computers, then getting access to their credit card information.
The player’s name is Maximillian Ashkar, and he preyed on fellow high stakes poker players. When he (and his victims) were at the European Poker Championship, they got him to confess to his actions, and subsequently called the authorities. The police ended up seizing Maximillian’s computer and the investigation is still ongoing – no wonder, though, this just happened days ago.
Meanwhile, the two poker players that confronted Maximillian weren’t left off the hook. They were also charged with deprivation of liberty and coercion, after they took the law into their own hands in order to squeeze a confession out of the guy. Whether they were in the wrong or not, one thing is for certain: they did something that most of us would have done in their situation.
Yet again, a respected member of the poker community turns out to be completely different than you would have expected. We’ll keep you updated with the news from this case as they come along.
