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Paul Leggett Video Interview Produced by Tokwiro EnterprisesPart 2 - Cheating at Absolute Poker Tokwiro Enterprises Video Page of Paul LeggettPaul Leggett Tokwiro Video on Youtube pt. 1Paul Leggett Tokwiro Video on Youtube pt. 2
Question #1
Susan
– The scandal at Absolute Poker took place over a six week period from September to October 2007. Is that correct?
 Paul L
– I believe it was late August to around mid-September, something like that.
Question #2
Susan
– And in this case, what does it mean it was an inside job?
 Paul L
– Essentially it was someone who was employed by Tokwiro that perpetrated thecheating. Essentially they were able to view players cards during real-time and cheat players and steal money from them
Question #3
Susan
– Was it just one person?
 Paul L
– Yes it was one person that perpetrated the cheating.
Question #4
Susan
– What was the reaction? Were you there at the time?
 Paul L
– I just started in late August, so it was literally overlapping. But it didn’t really become public until, or accusations of cheating didn’t become public until about mid-September.
Question #5
Susan
– Now you come from the computer side of things. I mean what was your reaction?
 Paul L
– I was shocked and very upset when I learned that it was an internal employee. I just didn’t believe that it could be true. So I was very, very upset and I even consideredleaving the company at that time. I was very, very new and wondered what I got myself into, but after working with Joe and being reassured by him that we were doingeverything we can so that this can never happen again and clean this things up, and thathe wanted me to play a big role in that. I took on the challenge and welcomed it, itneeded to be done.
Question #6
Susan
– How did he handle it? I mean here’s a man who’s a politician, who has hadexperience dealing with far worse perhaps, in terms of all the managing of life before.How did he handle this?
 Paul L
– He took it very seriously. He really decided to get much more involved in theoperations of the company at that point. I think he realized there were management issues
 
and operational issues that needed to be fixed. He was very upset and wanted to getinvolved to make sure this can never happen again.
Question #7
Susan
– Now you already alluded to the fact that somebody was able to look at peoplescards. Can you explain, in layman terms, exactly what happened?
 Paul L
– Sure. Essentially what the cheater was able to do was access a report that wehave in out back office reporting application.
Susan
– It’s a computer.
 Paul L
– Its an application that we use to manage the business that can do customer services and things like that, and there’s a report that is used to pull customers handhistories. This is a necessary report to look at plat after it has occurred, even to detectfraud, or just to make sure players have been credited properly, things of that nature. Sothis report had a flaw that allowed people to view hole cards during real time and this iswhat the cheater found and was able to exploit in order to cheat players.
Question #8
Susan
– The cheater found it or created it?
 Paul L
– Found it. Found a flaw in that allowed you to see hole cards during real time.
Question #9
Susan
– Now many blogs have said there was a superuser account.
 Paul L
– There wasn’t a superuser account in the sense that somebody with their player account and on the screen they could see the cards of everybody at the table. So in thatsense there definitely was not a superuser account. However the perpetrator was able toview hole cards during real time, it wasn’t that simple of a process, but he was able to play the poker game and then view this report and pull the data to see hole cards duringreal time.
Question #10
Susan
– Long before the company acknowledged there was a problem, we were hearingon the websites, on the blogs lots of chatter about the fact that there was a problem at thesite. Why do you think it took so long, or why did it take so long for the company toacknowledge that it had cheating going on?
 Paul L
– The way that this was handled was equally upsetting to me as the actualcheating itself. That the company put out some misleading, or even false statementsduring the initial accusations of cheating on the site. Basically that was able to happen because the perpetrator was in a role where he was responsible for security and was ableto kind of influence the statements or even direct what was going out in those statements,the content of them. It is one thing for cheating to occur on a site. It is another thing for acompany to deny it and its really done a lot of damage to our brand and to our companyand it was vey upsetting to us. So when Joe and I learned about this, obviously we werevery, very upset.
Question #11
Susan
– You’re new at this point. Who was running it?
 
 Paul L
– Joseph Norton was the CEO of the company at that time and there were a lot of managers that kind of had their own responsibility. Different responsibilities to managethe company but a lot of them were working independently. The acquisition of these two businesses and the merging of them was never really 100% complete. That was veryapparent to me when I joined the company, and there was kind of managers of differentdepartments, areas, working completely independent without a lot of centralizedmanagement. So that was a big problem. So there is a bunch of different managers at thetime responsible for different areas of the business.
Question #12
Susan
– So what happened to the cheater?
 Paul L
– Well the cheater was fired immediately upon us, Tokwiro learning whatoccurred here.
Question #13
Susan
– That’s it? No Police?
 Paul L
– Well at the time we learned that the cheating was perpetrated by somebodyinternally, really our first priority was to really fix the breach that allowed the cheating tooccur and to immediately understand exactly who might have been affected by this so wecan start the refund process immediately. So at that time in discussions, or we werediscussing this with the perpetrator and in exchange for a full confession and providing uswith everything with info of what had occurred. In exchange for that we gave the perpetrator protection of his name. That is why we didn’t come out with it or take anylegal action against them
Question #14
Susan
– This is kind of unusual, you’re allowed to do that?
 Paul L
– Well we can decide if we are going to press charges or not. And that’s all we did.Because we were a victim in this thing our concerns were making sure to get the money back, making sure that we closed the breach and refund the players, and we wanted to dothat quickly and decided at the same time it was best to make this deal in order for that tohappened very quickly.
Question #15
Susan
– Well you mentioned the regulator. I think the KGC requires any incident of cheating be reported within 24 hours. Did you do that?
 Paul L
– In this case Tokwiro did not report. But as soon as Joe had learned thatsomebody internal was involved and that there was an attempt to cover it up, it wasimmediately reported to the KGC. Roughly $800,000 was essentially stolen from players by the cheating that occurred.
Question #16
Susan
– What happened to the money?
 Paul L
– We were actually able to recover 100% of it. The money actually never left our site. It was never withdrawn off the actual pokesite in the accounts that won the money.
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