Home / Poker News September 2008 / Online poker fraud attempts turning more and more intricate
Online poker fraud attempts turning more and more intricate
Posted by: James Carter. - Sat, 2008-09-20 14:07
Ever since the use of online currency became wide-spread, there have been plenty of wise-guys attempting to hustle people out of their money under the cover of the relative anonymity provided by the World Wide Web. As the online world grows ever more sophisticated, so do the fraud schemes which don’t just get deeper and more intricate, their perpetrators grow ever bolder too.
In a quite unprecedented turn of events, an as yet unknown group of perpetrators targeted Danish poker professional Peter Jepsen through an extremely elaborate scam aiming to steal his passwords in order to gain access to his online poker accounts.
Jepsen was contacted through an email by a person claiming to represent the well-known Swedish television production company OTW media. The website which the perpetrator claimed as belonging to his organization was www.otwmedia.com. In the email exchange that ensued, the scammers succeeded in convincing Jepsen to participate in what would be a high stakes poker show, similar to the one titled “The Game” which the company had previously shot with the participation of some famous international poker pros.
Jepsen only became suspicious when the producers told him to download a PDF file off their site in which further information regarding the “project” was detailed. The file that Jepsen received was one sporting a .exe extension instead of the .pdf one, and that immediately prompted the Danish player to run it through a virus scan. Sure enough, the file turned out to contain a “trojan”, very much capable of not only accessing sensitive data but of capturing keyboard input information too.
Further investigation confirmed that the above mentioned website had in fact no connections with OTW, whose website is www.otw.se. OTW representatives made it clear that the company did not plan to continue “The Game” in the foreseeable future and that Jepsen had not been sent any kind of invitation by their representatives. Jepsen figured he’d been singled out for this never before seen type of scam on account of a recent successful high stakes run he’d had on Full Tilt Poker.
Far from the simple email-borne “Russian bride” and “Nigerian inheritance” scams of the past, this attempt is quite appalling not just through its elaborate nature but also through the fact that it found no shame in targeting a renowned poker personality.
