Rebuilding a brand
Thursday, November 20, 2008 - COO
Paul Leggett
Two cheating scandals, refunds, settlements, audits, negative press, more refunds, and more audits… It has been one hell of a year.
When I first learned of the cheating scandal on UltimateBet ten months ago, I felt sick to my stomach. As the investigation continued, the situation started seeming more and more impossible. To be honest, at times I wondered if I really wanted to be the COO of a company that was likely to implode. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how important it was to see this through. Here are hundreds of poker players who have been cheated out of millions of dollars. And here is a company full of amazing honest people, who are forced to take on a burden left behind by someone else. So I thought, you know what… no. There is no way I’m walking away from this. My co-workers and I gathered together and decided to take on this responsibility as a team. We decided to fight this thing, to clear our company’s name, and most importantly, to give our players back the money that was rightfully theirs. Making that happen was definitely worth the challenge.
On November 3rd, 2008 we settled with the previous owners for $15 million dollars. By November 5th, we awarded all the remaining refunds to players who were victim to the cheating on UltimateBet. Since then, I have personally spoken with a lot of the players who received their money back. As you might imagine, the list of players included some of the biggest names in the poker industry. Our company feels that we’ve done nothing more than get these players their money back, which is really the only honorable thing we could do. But I have to say, it was an amazing feeling when poker players from around the world not only thanked us, but openly endorsed us. In fact, a lot of them have even come back to play on the site after years of inactivity. By far the most important thing to me is the trust that we have regained in the community. Having been awarded the settlement from the previous owners, people are finally realizing that our company had nothing to do with the cheating scandal. We fought hard to bring the guilty parties to justice and give the money back to our players. I hope that these refunds will help restore any faith that may have been lost in online poker as a whole.
Now as we are getting closer and closer to putting this thing behind us, it’s time to focus on rebuilding our brands with security and fair play as the foundation. Although this cheating scandal was a nightmare, I think that it has made us more obsessed with security than we could possibly imagine on our sites. Our philosophy is simple… the more layers of security the better. We’ve greatly enhanced the methods for securing real-time hole cards, access to production code, and connection to our servers.
We organized a team of security experts who have developed our new security center application that automates the detection of abnormal winning statistics.
The security center has also been improved to include the detection of multiple accounts and we’re working on advanced features for the detection of
• sharing of accounts
• bots
• collusion
• money laundering
• chip dumping
We also plan to work with independent third parties that could potentially provide us with full auditing services, whereby they would audit all hand histories on our sites. We also want to give our players the option of turning to a third party authority if they do not feel we have fully resolved their issue or complaint. We are happy with the direction we are heading in and with a few intelligent promotions and marketing campaigns, who knows where we’ll be.
All in all, it’s a pretty exciting time. We have more high stakes action on UB now than we have in recent history and we’re quickly working on initiatives that should increase the high stakes action even more. We look forward to merging AbsolutePoker and UltimateBet onto one unified poker platform very soon, which will make us one of the largest poker communities online today.
It’s been a hard ten months, but I am ecstatic that our players have been refunded and that our employees can hold their heads up high again and be proud of their work.
P.S. I quit smoking when we did the refunds…anyone want to make a prop bet on how long I’ll last?
