The ongoing clusterfuck that is/was Ultimate Bet just can’t stop shitting out controversy. A post appeared on poker forum 2+2 on Friday with a link to an external site featuring Excel files containing the personal data of some 3.5m UB customers. The list was organized by country of residence, with America accounting for 2m of the names, 319k from Canada, 137k from the UK and the remainder from various other countries. The file did not contain data from Absolute Poker, UB’s sister site on the Cereus Network.
While the post containing the link was quickly deleted, it was up long enough to allow people to forward it around. Subject: Poker’s Noah Stephens-Davidovitz subsequently reported that the player data in the file appeared authentic, and included full names and screen names, email and physical addresses, phone numbers, birth date, IP addresses and UB account numbers and balances. However, no banking details — beyond the preferred method of depositing — appear to have been disclosed.
The leak follows the temporary shutdown of the Cereus Network sites on Nov. 30. The sites were back online within 24 hours, after some backstage boffins apparently performed CPR on the network’s corpse. But the number of players sitting at cash tables remains insignificant, and many of these are suspected to be ‘props’.
As luck would have it, poker journalist Haley Hintze, who is writing a book on the rise and fall of AP/UB, shared some tidbits in a recent blog post. The focus was on Philip Scott Tom, father of AP bigwig (and Black Friday indictee) Scott Tom. The self-described ‘Chairman of Poker,’ Phil Tom’s duties at AP are described by Hintze as “showing up once a year to chair AP’s annual board meeting, and then spending all the money that came his way.” Hintze claims to have a tape recording of certain AP shareholders complaining to management about the difficulty of attracting new investors with “a drunken Phil Tom always showing up at meetings with a hooker hanging on his arm.” Living the dream…
Hintze also reported that another AP-associated Black Friday indictee, Brent Beckley, was rumored to have been arrested in Miami a while back, although there was no confirmation of this. Guess we’ll just have to wait for the mugshot to be leaked to 2+2…
