We haven't won yet: latest (10/19) cliff's notes on AP scandal

[rbnn]

Calling this a "cover-up" understates its importance.

In fact, the denials by the management of the cheating would have prevented the victims from recovering money, had not additional evidence leaked out. Thus, those denials themselves constituted an attempt by management to defraud the victims, entirely independent of their function as a "cover-up".

To understand my point, we can distinguish four main ways in which Absolute behaved wrongly:

1. First, that individual players were cheated at their website.

2. Second, that Absolute lied about this in order to protect their reputation.

3. Third, that by lying about it, Absolute attempted to prevent the victims from being compensated.

4. Finally, that Absolute management themselves may have participated in the theft/cheating in (1).

The first issue alone has very limited relevance either to Absolute or to online poker: at most a few million dollars. The fourth issue is more serious, but its actual significance is still small if it were only "a few bad apples" doing the cheating.

The second issue is the "cover-up" that I think you were alluding to; that is serious but also understandable. Companies often try to put themselves in the best light.

But it is the third issue, denial of reimbursement, whose significance I think you underestimate. The denials of the cheating could not have been the work of a few "bad apples": these were carefully drafted press releases that must have received approval at all levels of management and security. There is no "reputational defense" available here as there was to the second issue above: management apparently intentionally and knowingly attempted to defraud the victims by the fact of their denials of the cheating.

So as to the initial cheating: the "only a few bad-apples" defense can work for Absolute. As to the cover-up per se, the "we are only trying to protect our reputation" could work.

But the knowing denial of cheating and of reimbursement of the victims, over a long period of time in public pronouncements by the management and by security, indicates active complicity in management in theft (denying reimbursement) and as such is distinguishable from, and more serious than, a mere "cover-up."

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http://www.pocketfives.com/0BE7AAF6-...13DA8D83A.aspx

I received a phone call late last night from someone in the UB/AP system....

" What if the latest release from AP is all that they can give you?" "Are the people causing the most uproar over this going to risk killing online poker just to hang someone?"

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Let me put it this way, Tom/AJ/whomever, since I know you're reading this: multiple senior executives at a company *blatantly* cheat their customers, cover it up four times by my count (not just the fact it was them, but the fact that it ever occurred), and then ask whether I'd personally be satisfied with coverup #5 in order to keep the heat off the game as a whole.

What the [censored] am I supposed to do here, guys? You tell me. You're presumably not completely braindead, so let me know at which point I'm supposed to stop calling for blood when I know you still have anything to do with operational control of the company holding lots of people's money. In this happy fun regulation-free ancap paradise world online poker belongs in, nobody's going to jail, but do you think you can possibly see your way around to my side of things, the one where this suggestion you're making is pretty [censored] hilarious?

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