Full Tilt Account hacked for $40,000

[shahmat]

I was alerted to this when I received an email from Full Tilt saying that I had changed my email address. I had not done this, so I immediately logged into my account and saw that it was empty.

I contacted support(through email because for some reason their security department does not have a phone number). Their security team looked into it and found that over the last three days (Fri, Sat and Sunday) someone gained access to my Full Tilt account and used it to play high stakes games. They bought gift certificates and then redeemed them back to my account(which was very weird and I'm still not sure of the purpose of that). Full Tilt investigated the play and apparently the money was not dumped to anyone in particular but was lost to multiple legitimate players.

They determined that the logins came from foreign IP Addresses but were not able to recover any funds. They also do not reimburse players for fraudulent losses. I've conversed with them alot through email since this happened, here is a snippet of the most recent one:



"The Gift Certificates, as mentioned in the first email, were redeemed
back into your account. This is extremely odd, as I would have thought
that the infiltrator of your account would have redeemed it into a
different account. It simply makes no sense why this player would
purchase gift certificates only to redeem them back into your account.

That being said, your funds were then used within your account to play
on the tables. All of your funds were lost to legitimate players and
cannot be reimbursed.

Unfortunately, Full Tilt Poker is not like a credit card company, we
cannot be responsible for what occurs on your account and your funds are
not insured by Full Tilt Poker."



It appears that they accessed my email account as well and deleted the confirmation emails that were sent when they purchased the gift certificates. Because of this I did not realize what was happening until it was too late.

I had all windows security updates running, an anti virus program, a software firewall, a hardware firewall and I never downloaded suspicious files/executables. I am not sure what more I can do. I went out and bought vista and new firewall/anti virus software but I really don't feel much safer.

I am not sure what to do, I feel pretty helpless. I am going to contact the police today, but I'm not sure what their power is in this type of situation. Does anyone else have any suggestions or feedback?? Has this happened to many others?

man feels like every time I post here, I'm posting something crappy that has happened [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img].

sol.