Partypoker’s ongoing global campaign to rid its sites of illicit bot activity has continued with the site’s recent announcement of several more dozen seized accounts caught cheating on party’s global (.com) and France-Spain (.eu) platforms. In an update covering the month of June, 2019, party identified another 67 fraudulent bot accounts, which make use of automated decision-making software, usually at lower and middle stakes, to steal money over time from human players.
According to a recent post on the popular partypoker blog, 63 of the 67 closed accounts came on party’s global dot-com platform, while the other four were found to be employed on the shared France-Spain dot-eu platform. The latest batch of announced seizures all occurred during June 2019.
Party declared that $24,257 was seized from existing balances for the 63 uncovered dotcom accounts, while a further €8,888 was confiscated from accounts belonging to accounts participating from France or Spain. The relatively higher average amounts seized from the France-Spain platform is unusual, and it marks the first time the average from the dot-eu accounts has exceeded that from seized accounts on the global dot-com site.
When we last checked on party’s bot-hunting efforts a couple of months back, party had identified and seized balances from a total 371 accounts playing on either the dot-com or dot-eu platforms. Party also shut down another 42 bot accounts in May 2019 — 33 from the dot-com platform and nine more on the dot-eu side, meaning that party has taken down a total of 480 such botting accounts in a little over half a year of its resurgent efforts to combat the activity.
In a separate but related topic, partypoker has never publicly identified if any US-based players have been caught botting on its New Jersey-based sites. Any such activity would be handled differently, being forwarded to New Jersey’s Division of Gambling Enforcement (DGE) for probable criminal prosecution, an option not as readily available under European laws and regulations. Party would thus be bound from commenting public on any cases involving any American botters until a DGE investigation into any such activity had been completed.
Not so on the global/European scene, where partypoker serves as the investigator and judge. As party noted, “partypoker encourages players to continue reporting all suspicious activity at its tables, by emailing [email protected] partypoker promises to investigate all incidents reported.
“The poker room continues to invest in resources aimed at safeguarding the safety of its players, spearheaded by a specialist Poker Fraud Team comprising a collection of former poker professionals whose duty is to investigate suspicious activity and aid partypoker in ridding the site of unscrupulous accounts.”
