Money vanished while McPhee was playing
Late last week, poker pro Kevin McPhee revealed via Twitter that his GGPoker account had allegedly been hacked, his bankroll syphoned off. Though the poker room did reimburse him, McPhee is still largely in the dark as to how his account was compromised.
In a series of posts, McPhee explained that the hack occurred while he was actually playing at the online poker room. He was competing in the 2020 World Series of Poker Online, “actively registering, rebuying, etc….,” so everything seemed fine. But when he went to dip into the cashier for a rebuy in the $500 Mini Main Event, McPhee found he had just 62 cents remaining in his account. He did not explicitly say so, but it is strongly implied that he had plenty of funds to rebuy before he saw that he had less than a dollar left.
The most confusing part is that McPhee was online and logged into his GGPoker at the time; he had not disconnected between the time he had last seen his account balance with sufficient funds and when he saw it drained. The implication here, of course, is that it seems that somehow someone was able to make a simultaneous login or otherwise circumvent GGPoker security to grab McPhee’s money.
McPhee added than none of his other accounts have seen any sort of suspicious activity.
Had been experiencing disconnects
He also said that he has been having technical problems with GGPoker for quite some time, experiencing frequent disconnects. He relayed a particular frustrating instance in which he was in a tournament that awarded four $5,000 tournament seats. With just four players remaining, his client software kept disconnecting, eventually causing him to blind out of the tournament.
McPhee said that GGPoker’s representatives have been helpful, but ultimately there was no real solution to either his disconnection problem or his hacker problem.
“Being hacked, the constant DC issues… which are insufferable, and lack transparency are sending me home early. GG indeed,” McPhee said.
And though GGPoker’s terms state:
We take no responsibility for any third party access to your account and under no circumstances shall the Company be liable for any losses incurred by you as a result of misuse of your password by any person or for any unauthorized access to your account and all transactions where your user name and password have been entered correctly will be regarded as valid, whether or not authorized by you.
The online poker room did refund the money McPhee had stole from him.
McPhee also pointed the finger at a potential suspect, though it appears that he deleted any mention of the person, likely because he did not have any definitive proof. He said a Canadian poker player’s name is allegedly connected to the e-mail used to withdraw McPhee’s funds.
