In his personal blog on PokerRoad.com, Joe Sebok wrapped up his first year as a sponsored player with UB.com and closed the book on his personal investigation into the prior misconduct on the site.
Sebok begins the heartfelt posting by saying, “Roughly one year ago, I signed with UB and pledged to put in as much effort as was possible to do three things: 1) Get the account names involved in the super-user scandal released; 2) Get all the hand histories out to those who requested them during the cheating scandal; and 3) Attempt to get out the physical names of the actual cheaters, and those who helped them cheat, released to the public.” Over the past year, Sebok has spent an inordinate amount of time on the above issues and notes some of the success he has had as well as some of the pitfalls.
“We were able to accomplish #1 fairly quickly,” Sebok stated, but he also indicated that he had difficulties with the other two goals on the list. The hand history requests, he notes, “have proven more difficult for a number of data reasons on the CEREUS Network side. It seems there were many issues when the network was began and the old data/servers were migrated/changed/what have you.” Sebok says that Paul Leggett, the Chief Operating Officer of the CEREUS Network, will be addressing the issues on his blog at a future date.
Sebok said that legal issues beset the final part of the UB scandal – naming those who were actually behind the situation: “To say that the information was murky and many individuals who were directly involved would never talk to us is certainly an understatement.” Through the efforts of “Mookman” from the Two Plus Two forum and the online blog Wicked Chops Poker, Sebok’s investigation revealed the names of those allegedly responsible for a case that ended up costing UB.com millions of dollars in restitution to those who were affected.
In the Wicked Chops exposé, the previously alleged mastermind, former World Series of Poker Main Event champ Russ Hamilton, is named as the main player in the game. Other names associated with Hamilton, including software developer Greg Pierson, former Ultimate Bet fraud manager Carolyn Heick, and associates Bonnie Leinhos and Travis Makar, were implicated as alleged cohorts in the scam.
Those that have been cleared of wrongdoing through Sebok and Wicked Chops’ multi-part story include two of UB’s most prominent faces, 11-time bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth and reigning National Heads-Up Poker Championship winner Annie Duke, as well as Freddy Deeb, David “Devilfish” Ulliott, Antonio Esfandiari, Layne Flack, and Robert Williamson III.
As a part of Sebok’s work on the investigation of the scandal, he released to Wicked Chops a list of players who were a part of the Ultimate Bet scam. These “super users” – called that because of the program that allowed them to see hole cards of their opponents – featured 117 user names among 23 different accounts. All totaled, it is estimated that those involved in the scam took $22 million from recreational players to top pros such as Mike Matusow, Prahlad Friedman, and Brad Booth.
Although Sebok has been able to discover who was behind the UB scandal, he notes that there is little chance those involved will ever be punished for the crime. “I wish we were a police force, but we are not,” Sebok writes. “I wish we could really round up all of these people and interrogate them, but we can’t. I believe we did as much as we possibly could to this end though. I also wish we were a court and we could try them all and jail the convicted, but again, we cannot do this. The poker community would be a better place if we could, but as of right now this just isn’t possible. If it was, believe me, I would be working on it.”
Sebok closes his blog by saying, “With that said, I am excited to be able to hopefully close this chapter and move onto the next. Now, if anything else pops up I will be happy to get back into it and delve further, but as of right now, as of August 2010, I don’t see any deeper I can get into this scandal or any more we can do to close it.”
