[El Diablo]

Nat,

Anyone thinking you should go down there for free is silly. Expert witnesses, auditors, consultants, anyone taking time away from their normal life to do this sort of stuff gets compensated.

I do think it would be better if you took Adanthar along with you, in which case you should not chop up the fee, you should have them increase it.

I also doubt that you would compromise your integrity for a free trip and a few dollars.

Having said that, without any experience doing real computer forensic type work or deep financial analysis, and without access to the actual identified cheater accounts, I highly doubt there's anything you can find out here. Will you have access to all their banking transactions? How about access to all personnel/ownership information of all their corporate shells and holding companies in such a way that you can trace the money flow from deposit -> money on site -> cashouts / profits. Without being able to do that, there's really no way to say where the money is going and who is really involved.

What I expect will happen is you will go down there and meet some really nice guys who will show you a great time. They will show you names of "cheaters" who are "no longer in any way associated with the company" due to this. And they will claim that they never had any knowledge of any of this stuff going on. And that all the lies/coverups were orchestrated by those bad apples.

But you will really have no way of knowing who knew what and who is really still involved. It will just be a question of whether or not you believe these guys. And by bringing you down there and forming a personal bond with you, you will be more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.

So, I don't see anything wrong with this, but without full access to gameplay, financial, and ownership records, it's pretty impossible to find stuff.

I'd ask for a full list of equity owners in Absolute Poker. If they don't release that (which I bet they won't), it's impossible to tell if anything has really changed behind the scenes.