Contact info for PokerHuis?

[maxd]

I'm broadcasting this in the hope that someone will be able to share an email address for contacting PokerHuis. Anyone?

So far I've tried support@pokerhuis.com and all I get is dead-end automated responses. Their former licensor was able to point me to their (former) executives but they claim to have no knowledge of how to contact the site. Googling has yielded nothing useful.

Any info would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Max.

[Elgoog]

ray at pokerhuis.com
john at pokerhuis.com

[maxd]

FWIW I have tried those guys. No response yet.

[Casinomeister]

Over the side with yee:
http://www.casinomeister.com/rogue/pokerhuis.php

[maxd]

See also our freshly minted Casinomeister Warning: PokerHuis: no pay, Support is a toxic asset.

[pokerhuis]

Dear Bryan, Mark,

To our regrets we have noticed that you blacklisted our website at casinomeister.com which is causing already a lot of problems for us at this moment. You are mentioning that we didn't payout the profits of our casinoplayers and that the support is bad. We would like to explain something to you and would like to ask you to remove us from the list.

IT'S IMPORTANT THAT YOU READ EVERYTHING, but I will start by telling you the solution that we choose at 2011-03-22. The playing involved in this issue, was a fraudulent player / part of a group of fraudulent accounts. Nevertheless we have paid him back the money that he initially deposited to do the fraud. You can see the screenshot of the neteller payment.

The player is a player from the UK, where we don't do any marketing and have no partners to promote us. Since we are a 100% Dutch dedicated website / Pokerroom.

When we opened the Pokerhuis Casino (we did this after the launch of the pokerwebsite) we had a period that there were created a group of fraudulent accounts from the same ip-range. All with the same patterns in their gameplay and behaviour. They made an account, made their first deposit (with 100%=€555 BONUS), started playing the same game and with the same bets. If they lost, they created a new account and did the same. When they won, they waited untill they received the money and started again with the same process. Creating a new account... etc etc. After a while we started to see the stucture/patterns in the accounts and gameplay. We noticed that the IP adresses were all coming from the same range. We decided to ask these players to send in their KYC details. We have gotten no response on this. At that time we have deleted all those players on the fact that they were abusing our welcome bonus, were playing in groups, and were playing with multiple accounts. After this it was quiet with new UK players and it looked solved.

Now regarding this player who has come to casinomeister.com, who is naming himself *snip* in his account at pokerhuis.com:

He is , after our research, part of a series fraudelent accounts. Only this serie of account is created end November and end December 2010 but never used till Februari 2010. After Februari 2010 are these account playing according the same system. They are being played one by one to abuse our welcome bonus. After research this is clear by the structure of play, amounts of deposits, the exact same game that is played. We have discovered the following:

1. All player accounts from this group of players are NOT registered with their own IP-Adress, but with a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a Dedicated Server. Their own IP-Adress is not traceable with those tactics.
2. The players NEVER play at the same time, but in turn. Only when the account is out of money, a new account from this group is being used (to claim the welcome bonus again). When a account won money , they wait till the withdrawal is received. Only after the withdrawal is received they are starting again with another account.
3. The time between registration and playing is very long and is similar for all accounts in this group.
4. There is a clear similarity between the first deposit, the game that is played, and the betting patern.

Because we have discovered that in this batch of 15 new UK players there was the same structure, we decided to block *snip* en to do further research. The above was the result.

We have let this go on under our close monitoring for almost 4 weeks after the blocking of *snip* to see if there was any activity from the other UK accounts and this was negative. We have asked *snip* and the other 14 accounts to send us their KYC details and in these 4 weeks we haven't received a reaction! We even think that *snip* is 1 or 2 people who are widely scamming online casino's in this way.

Anyway, we have decided to block all accounts from this serie and where even so kind to send back their initial deposit. See screenshot:

*snip*

Since we have done our research profound we have made this decision based on our terms which you can find on the PROMOTIONS page from our Pokerhuis Casino.

For what it's worth I can show you a screenshot with his account comments from our backoffice:

*snip*

COMMUNICATION WITH CASINOMEISTER.COM

The end of March we received a message from Max from Casinomeister with the complaint from *snip*. He got a response from support, but because the player apparently has convinced Casinomeister that we have not treated the withdrawal in a honest way this is escalated to me. I have closed this ticket in our ticketsystem and contacted Max by email at max@casinomeister.com. I thought that this was the right email. See the following screenshot:



This showed up to be not a correct email. After the above message from Max I tried to mail him a few times again but i have gotten no response, because of the emailadres what didn't was the correct one. I thought that everything was clear now with Casinomeister because i did not receive a reaction. I really don't like this, certainly because we are listed here wrongly.

We have worked very hard for the last 3 years to create a very good product, and this is a thing that can ruin everything we have build. Even that this is only one player, still this is not the publicity we would like to receive.

Hoping that this is clear to all.

Regards,

Pokerhuis

[Repro]

Wow... this actually looks very plausible.

My personal feeling, after reading this, is that there may have been a mistake by putting them in the Roque Pit

[vinylweatherman]

What about the "reply to" function in email. This would have sent the reply back to the email address from which Max sent his email from, and thus would have been the correct one.

Had there been an open line of communication, things would never have escalated this far, and I am sure Max would have considered this a credible argument for thinking that there was a small number of players multi-accounting.

The reason this happened is that a poker room created a promo without considering whether the rules were sufficiently "bulletproof" against CASINO play.

The ONLY term these players broke is having several accounts, their gameplay was clearly within the poorly designed rules, and on it's own is no justification for confiscating winnings.

The IP evidence on it's own is not enough, since very few people actually HAVE their own personal IP address, since IPv4 just can't cope, and has recently run out of new numbers to allocate to providers, which has created something of a crisis. ISPs are getting around the problem by using dynamically allocated IP addresses, so the above evidence only shows that the players all use the same node from the same ISP. The rest is down to the mathematics of probabilty, in that it is highly improbable that 15 UK players should suddenly, and INDEPENDENTLY, decide to play in a DUTCH poker room, all live near enough to each other to run from the same ISP node, and all like playing casino games in a poker client, rather than a proper casino client.

If they were deliberately cloaking their true IP address, they didn't do it very well by using a narrow range, rather than a much wider one.

The poker client should have read MAC codes from the computers being used, and this would have provided the additional evidence needed to confirm the suspicions that this was one or two players running multiple accounts.

You should submit an appeal to Max - in other words, PAB against this PLAYER.

[maxd]

My personal feeling, after reading this, is that there may have been a mistake by putting them in the Roque Pit

I have about twenty emails I have sent to various people connected with PokerHuis (past and present) where I always use my full and proper email address:

When they chose to reply, which was rarely and never helpfully, they had no difficulties. I also provided that email address time and again when I entered and re-entered and re-entered it into their Support Ticket system.

AFAIC, if anyone was having trouble finding my email address it's because they weren't trying very hard.

I find it very interesting that absolutely nothing was done in all my attempts to contact these guys UNTIL they hit the Rogue Pit and the Warning was posted. Then, all of a sudden, they have no problem contacting us and pleading their case.

As to the confusion regarding my sig, yeah my bad, I'll change that now. It wasn't intended to be an email address, just a geeky way of saying "I'm at Casinomeister".

PS. just noticed that the max@... email addy -- an old email address for me at CM -- was still listed in my user profile. I've corrected that.

[vinylweatherman]

I have about twenty emails I have sent to various people connected with PokerHuis (past and present) where I always use my full and proper email address:

When they chose to reply, which was rarely and never helpfully, they had no difficulties. I also provided that email address time and again when I entered and re-entered and re-entered it into their Support Ticket system.

AFAIC, if anyone was having trouble finding my email address it's because they weren't trying very hard.

I find it very interesting that absolutely nothing was done in all my attempts to contact these guys UNTIL they hit the Rogue Pit and the Warning was posted. Then, all of a sudden, they have no problem contacting us and pleading their case.

As to the confusion regarding my sig, yeah my bad, I'll change that now. It wasn't intended to be an email address, just a geeky way of saying "I'm at Casinomeister".

PS. just noticed that the max@... email addy -- an old email address for me at CM -- was still listed in my user profile. I've corrected that.

Maybe it was their INTERNAL communication that left something to be desired. Some were confused by your sig, and used it as an email address, but others clearly DID manage to reply to the correct one, but were not the people who ended up dealing with the problem.

It also seems from the player's story that he was simply being given the "talk to the hand" treatment, and was never told his accounts had been closed for fraud. The internal ticket system should NOT have failed because of mistakes in email addresses, so it seems the tickets were being closed due to a deliberate decision to ignore this player - in effect, he was given no chance to appeal his case internally.

There are sometimes innocent players caught up in the net when a group of accounts gets linked for some kind of fraud, so a proper appeals process is needed, no matter how certain the casino is of the player's guilt.

Since entry to the rogue pit here can do such damage to their business, Pokerhuis should have ensured in advance that they had a line of communication with Bryan & Max in case any player issues spilled over into the forum. Fraudulent players often try to manipulate Max or Bryan into deciding in their favour, and the easiest way an operator can play into their hands is to fail to respond.

This warning was not down to Max deciding the player was mistreated, it was down to there being no proper response from Pokerhuis to either the player, or himself, thus no evidence was available from Pokerhuis, and Max only had the player's story, which was backed up by his own experience when trying to get hold of someone at Pokerhuis.


If this player does turn out to be guilty of multiaccounting, I doubt he is going to be let off on this technicality, and he will be banned, named, and shamed, plus invoiced for €500 for wasting Max's time (yes, it's in the terms for the PAB service, although it's pretty hard to enforce - and most scammers just settle for the life ban and move on).

As for the marketing, it is NOT marketing that draws fraudsters and advantage players to a weakly designed promotion, they go looking for them, and in these cases it is the player that finds the casino, no matter how narrowly their marketing is targeted. This information about a weak promotion is then shared on certain fora dedicated to the art of taking casinos for every penny possible by fair means or foul.
There are also rogue affiliates who conspire with such players, bringing them the information on weak promotions, along with step by step instructions of how to play, what game to play, and even when to play. This is why such players seem to deposit the same amount, play the same games, and in the same way. It does not mean the PLAYERS have conspired to form a group, it is that they have followed the lead of a rogue affiliate, who gets their cut through deals such as CPA.
Lastly, we have spammers, who do NOT target their spam to the market the casino wants to target, although in this respect I don't recall ever seeing Pokerhuis spam in my inbox, although I HAVE received what is clearly casino related spam in German, French, etc, a clear indication that the casino wanted to target players from these countries, but that they had a rogue affiliate who simply spammed to every email address he could get hold of.

Pokerhuis could defend themselves by adding a term that limits players to those from the countries they target, and have the registration process block registrations from disallowed countries. If this was done, players from the UK would have to submit false registration information in order to bypass the blocking, which would be fraud even before they took a bonus, or started registering additional accounts.

Whilst this particular promo exists, Pokerhuis is at risk of other players trying a similar fraud, and next time they are likely to change their tactics knowing that the one as described by the Pokerhuis rep above has been "busted".

I am a little surprised that the multiaccounters made it this far in a POKER application, where there is the very real danger of collusion between the 15 accounts in the poker games until caught. I am also surprised that only the casino was targeted for the welcome bonus, rather than any attempt to rig the poker games through collusion.

Maybe *snip* was crap at poker, and would still lose even if he had 2/3 of the table on his own accounts