My story
only just got round to reading this whole thread, i wont give my opinion, but think it is worthwile me relating my own personal story.
a few years ago i moved back to the area i grew up in, my brother still lives there and one day i went to his place and he was playing a casino, he said i could play for him, i then went on and promptly lost him a 100, to which he replied "dont worry, it wasnt my money, it was casino bonus money"
from then on i got into casinos, but i needed to sort out 2 things first, a computer and an internet connection.
i was unemployed at that time (as was my brother) so he recommended to me the same bottom of the range computer as his.
next i had to sort out an ISP, in my area about 10 years ago a company called comcast came up with this good idea of connecting everyone who didnt have a phoneline for free, my area is quite impoverished (its one of the few places in the UK to be desiginated an EU poverty zone), so in my flat i had a telephone line which could only be used by one company, and that is NTL (ntl had bought comcast in my area by now), so rather than go and pay BT 70 to be connected, not to mention more expensive phonecalls i went with NTL. for the exact same reasons my brother was with NTL.
so here we are, i will mention that me and my brother live at different addresses.
but we've got same computer,
same surname,
same area, (infact it was only the last 3 digits of our postcode that differed)
similar static IP, going through the same local server.
but it gets even worse, me and my bro like to play poker, but then one day we couldnt use betfair poker, turns out it was an NTL specific problem, on the betfair forum, someone posted up a proxy address to go through, we both done that, then suddenly we could both play poker.
when my brother was playing the casinos, he was a fan of red-dog, his justification being that you "get a lot of ties", which wasnt to bad in the days of x5 bonuses,but suddenly he was losing quite heavily and he accepted that reddog is a high house edge game and in the days of x20+ D+B bonuses you are on a loser with that strategy, so he eventually started to copy the way i played.
after a while we had exhausted all of the sign-ups of all the major casinos, so if any new casino came out, we would inevitably play the same casino within days as either one of us would tell the other next time we spoke.
so now weve got,
us using the same proxy
same style of play
signing up a the the same time
all of the above is true, but heres the hypothetical part, i didnt know that gaming club japan was a separate casino, had i known i would of played there and i would of told my brother who would of played there aswell.
given all the info above, i think i would have been more dammed than those in this thread,but the difference is that my brother and I are seperate people playing from separate computers from separate addreses.
(to be honest that isnt the case now as i have moved, but if this had came up 6 months ago, it would have been!).
obviously the above is not coincidence, the above similarities between my account and my brothers are through the fact that we know each other and have influenced each other.
but lets talk coincidences, given a large enough sample you will get lots of matching data between things.
now i am going to go off topic to illustrate a point, but i'm going to mention "cold case files" that the police are solving now with the aid of DNA technology.
there are people being arrested now and sentenced for crimes that have happened a long time ago and the only evidence is DNA, the jury get quoted figures of "5 million to one" and the jury gives it about 20 mins deliberation before coming back with the guilty verdict, does the jury consider that with 60 million people in the country that another 11 people have the same genetic markers ? no they dont, because they are not considering the population, they are considering that one person there.
why dont the police say to themselves "oh shit we have 12 matches", they dont because the police have only about 3 million DNA profiles on their database, so when they run it through they only get the one hit and thus the jury are not only told its a "5 million to one chance", but are told its "the only match in the country"
sorry to have digressed, but the point i'm making is that giving a large enough sample, you would always be able to link people and then quote the odds of that happening are "millions to one", but if the sample is big enough then chances of it happening is not millions to one, but an actual certainty.
another good example is the question "how many people do you have to have in a room, so that the odds of 2 of them sharing a birthday is greater than 50% ? IIRC the answer is 25"
now think then we are talking about 100,000's using the same casino we are going to have a lot of match up between details if we look for them.
now onto the "same computers have been used", i understand if there is someway of being able to tell if a computer has been used before , that the casinos want to keep this secret. i'm no tech expert, but i am a moderator on another forum (non gambling forum) and i'm use to having idiots on the forum opening up multiple accounts after being banned, i know there is ways of spotting the same PC, but they are no way foolproof.
for example i can read the browser someone is using, operating system and a few other system stats, but when i started banning people with exactly the same as those who i had already banned, i found i was banning a lot of innocent people, because they were unlucky to have the same "markers" as those who had been banned, this is an example of the proverbial baby and the bath water mentioned earlier in this thread.
getting away from coincidences, and going back to myself, you will find that a lot of things are connected, for example i lived in an area of high unemployment, thus i was unemployed, thus i bought the cheapest PC, thus i used the cheapest ISP. so if someone was to pick on my specific geographical area they is a high likelyhood they would find similarites between me and others in addition to my brother.
a few people mentioned earlier in the thread, that they are mostly UK, but this is an example of if you look for it, you will find it.
bryan, you mentioned earlier in the thread that you compare this with other "fraud rings" you have come across in the past, i trust your instinct in these matters, but can i ask, if this is a fraud ring why arnt we talking 5,10, 20 or even more accounts being opened from the same computer or source, from what ive read it seems to be 2 accounts (maybe 3) that have matched up in each case and neither you or the casino have said ALL of these accounts are linked, just 2 or 3 in each separate case, something which you would expect from my arguments above.
this post is not exonerate these individuals, but likewise i think we should all keep an open mind before passing judgement.
). Another one of these persons is a webmaster, so I figure he's doing the same thing.
