Offshore Online Poker Hack Makes Another Argument For Regulation

Every serious gambler has encountered a losing streak so improbable that it appears to defy the standard deviations of luck and leaves them suspecting the game is rigged.

Usually, it’s just the natural “woe is me” human mentality and a case of sour grapes. But over the past month, the online poker world has been mired in a scandal where it wasn’t the grapes that were sour, and where all such suspicions appear to have been justified.

Across several sites that don’t serve the regulated U.S. market — America’s Cardroom (ACR), CoinPoker, GGPoker, and the sweepstakes-style site ClubWPT Gold — evidence mounted in 2025 and this year of a player or players who could see the hole cards of their opponents and could therefore make correct poker decisions every time. For anyone who was around 20 years ago, it was reminiscent of the UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker “superuser” scandals from 2005-07, in which people on the inside had access to others’ accounts.

Last week, Wired dug in deep by speaking to an online poker-playing victim using the pseudonym “Alex,” who claimed to have lost about $30,000 and was the first to uncover the apparent cheating method. Alex used the AI agent Claude to analyze his poker results, and Claude discovered evidence of a program installed on his computer without his knowledge that was able to take screen captures — and repeatedly did so when he was playing on ACR against one particular opponent.

As with the UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker cases, unimaginably high win rates for certain accounts triggered investigations.

In those incidents two decades ago, it was believed that targeted players were bilked for at least $22 million. This recent scandal doesn’t appear to have reached that level, with Wired estimating players lost between $1.5 million and $4 million to the opponents allegedly receiving their hole card information.

Two decades ago, there was no such thing as regulated online poker in the U.S. Since 2013, there has been — albeit in a very limited number of states. So in this very different environment, it’s worth asking: Could a superuser scandal happen under the relatively watchful eye of state regulators?

The regulated era

Only six states are currently running regulated online poker games: Nevada (where digital poker is permitted but other casino games are not) and the full-fledged online casino states of New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia.

Interstate player pooling is available among certain states and on certain sites, but the reality is that tournament fields remain modest compared to the current international sites or to the poker-boom-era games, and cash game stakes in the U.S. are lower as well. At PokerStars Exclusively on FanDuel, for example, the highest available no-limit hold’em blinds are $50/$100. The high-stakes lobby at ACR reaches double that, and at Full Tilt Poker some 20 years ago, the cash stakes routinely hit $500/$1,000.

So there are two factors that could, theoretically, put players at current U.S. sites at ease:

1) Regulators oversee the sites and have the power to fine or shut down operators without proper compliance protocols.

2) It’s probably not worth a hacker’s time to try to cheat anyone out of a couple hundred bucks when they could instead grab tens of thousands of dollars in a session at an unregulated site.

The sites where the incidents are alleged to have taken place this year and last have responded in a variety of ways. ClubWPT Gold (where an incident took place in 2025) told Wired it investigated, banned the account believed to have cheated, and refunded losses. CoinPoker did likewise, banning the suspected cheater.

GGPoker allowed the account to remain active after suspicions were first raised, though it did announce new security measures on Oct. 15, including banning third-party software tools that many players love but that expose users to hacking risks.

ACR, which is based in Costa Rica, has taken a very different tack: It sent players an email claiming it could find no evidence of cheating and will not be issuing any refunds.

Let the sunshine in

The argument in favor of gambling regulation always includes some variation of the cliché about sunlight being the best disinfectant. In the world of sports betting, that has frequently proven to be true. Suspicious betting patterns in high-profile scandals involving NBA players, MMA fighters, MLB pitchers, and more have been detected because the bets were made with regulated sportsbooks, and those sportsbooks work with watchdog agencies like IC 360.

Thus far, 13-plus years into the state-regulated online poker era, there hasn’t been a whiff of a cheating scandal. That doesn’t mean nobody is getting away with anything. But for now, signs point to regulation creating a more secure environment.

Or to an environment without high enough stakes to attract cheating.

Or both.

The recent bad news for international and offshore online poker can certainly be spun as an argument in favor of sticking to regulated games.

Unfortunately for U.S.-based poker players, very few state legislatures have seen fit over the last 13 years to provide that option.