The scandal was big news, and PokerStars was quick to react: they closed 38 accounts involved in the illegal activities, in which the conspirators earned a total of about $494,000 and PokerStars paid $2,100,000 in compensation to the victims. Travelling to Beijing it turned out that Chinese authorities have little power on such cases, hence foreign gangs know they can get away with such charges easily.
Such collusion is not very common, but not unprecedented. PokerStars, the largest online poker room have previously refunded $80,000 to players who unwittingly went up against poker "bots" - automated card-playing software programs.
The problem is (as former PokerStars employee cited by the BBC says) that preventing collusions is virtually impossible, gaming companies can only discover illegal activities in retrospect, after gamers send them complaints.
Such complaints are very popular, but as it turns out, are rarely due to collusion, 95% of the players are just frustrated because they lose, and suspect cheating. This is why PokerStars has a hard time investigating all the complaints, but they say the are still pledged to investigate all of them.
PokerStars claims they now have fortified their security system and their proactive anti-collusion softwares, so they consider online play safe now.
Mr. Broadbent, eager to find justice, plans to fly to China again later this year to check the progress made by the local police investigating the PokerStars colluders.
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