Swedish national betting operator 
Svenska Spel is taking the serious measure of locking 14 poker accounts after details of an alleged bot-based cheating conspiracy emerged. The suspended accounts reportedly contained over US $16k of the more than $208k they have won in the past year.
As first reported by PokerFuse, the investigation began a few months ago after a player reported suspicious practices involving what appeared to be bots, aka illegal computer systems that mechanize online poker play. Svenska Spel representatives posted notices on its player forum that the bots made their living playing in Hold’Em games ranging from NL50 to NL500 and taken most of their winnings in the past six months.
The state-owned Svenska Spel has reported the matter to the Swedish police and the Swedish Gaming Board. As one of the few authorized gambling providers in Sweden and the only one licensed to offer online poker, Svenska Spel is the only place where Swedish players can play online poker in the country. Ultimately, this falls on the company itself who admitted that it had known of the matter beforehand and failed to report it to the proper authorities. They’re stopping short of revealing the screen names of those responsible while investigations are still underway, but this does paint a pretty unflattering picture of the state-owned operator who will now have to carry the burden of having its GTECH G2 software-run online poker room tainted by cheats.
To be fair, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened to an online poker room. Even PokerStars had to deal with its own cheating scandal a few years ago involving collusion among Chinese players. So Svenska Spel can take comfort knowing they’re not the first. But it still paints a negative picture if you’re in that list.
