[teddyFBI]

UPDATE: I had been all set to sit down and post a detailed recap of everything I learned last night via a one hour long 2:30am phone conversation with my mom, and the full array of emails that she forwarded to me (why she felt them unimportant to send at first I'm not quite sure), when I received the following email:

__________________________________________________ __
<font color="blue">Hi –
The issue involving your mother’s account (“xyz”) has been escalated to the top management at PokerStars. We are doing a complete and detailed review of the case. Once it’s completed, one of the directors of the company will be in touch with your mother. This may take a day or two and we appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Best regards,
Lee Jones
PokerStars Poker Room Manager
_________________________________
</font>


As such (and sorry to disappoint soap opera fans), I will not be making any more substantive posts in this thread until they complete their investigation. In fact, I had already been worrying that by "outing" this whole chain of events, I would have made it hard for anybody from Stars to actually admit that a mistake had been made. I did not want to make a huge production out of this -- I would have rather kept everything on the D/L, but became very frustrated with their unwillingness to even CONSIDER that a mistake had been made. At every turn, I have tried to make clear that I have always held Stars out to be the most reputable poker site out there (although that accolade looks more and more akin to being the tallest midget in the circus). Mom even emailed me this morning to suggest that given Jeff's role as security supervisor, and his steadfast insistence that something improper happened, he might even have an incentive to forge evidence if he now had to explain himself to the highest possible honcho's. I tried to assure her that I wouldn't be too concerned (and even if I were concerned, what really could either of us do about it?).

Having heard what I have now heard, my confidence interval, following a format that others hear have used, is something like {98% Stars error, 2% trojan/virus}. But at the end of the day, my mother's long-winded yet eloquent post to me earlier in this thread sums everything up best. This isn't about some 55-year old's right to play the nano-limits (by the way, one of Jeff's other emails alluded to this and he said that one of the "damning" pieces of evidence was that no one at Stars could possibly understand why anyone would play so many hours <font color="red">(quoting directly from his email) "in games where even a phenomenal win rate at each and every one of the eight tables wouldn't be worth a human's time." </font> To be fair, he also claims there was other damning evidence but the judgmental nature of that language stunned me -- it's essentially saying 'you must be a bot because no one who values life would spend that much time playing the nanolimits.' Granted that opinion is still based on his assumption that she had SEVERAL 43-hour sessions (yes, his email said she had done it SEVERAL times) this month alone. It is those alleged 43-hour sessions that I did my best to direct Lee's attention to, and hopefully what they are reviewing as we speak.

But I digress: the most cogent advice given in this thread was probably my mom's email that I copied that simply gave (from a relative novice's point of view) an eloquent dissertation on the dangers we all face as online poker players. So I now wait with baited breath. This is the stage I have been trying to reach for the last 48 hours, and here we are.