Poker Cheating Scandal on French Poker Forum Widens

Last Tuesday I posted about a French poker player who was swindled by a fellow player on the French poker forum "Le Club Poker." Now there's lots more on that developing story.

Contributors and administrators of the French forum started to investigate the
different ins and outs of this gloomy story, trying to bust the scammer and force him to pay back the $500 he scammed from another member. Soon it appeared that another contributor was also scammed of $500 by the same guy! And the reason why he didn't tell everyone at first is because it was HIS intention to scam a poker room! What he agreed to with the scammer was to play online and chip dump to him in order to quickly and "securely" clear his bonus points. And needless to say, after chip dumping money to the scammer, he was never payed back.

Then some people on the forum, by crossing different sources, were able to discover some identity information and even a picture of the scammer. That's when the original scammer came back to life on the forum saying that his different poker rooms and forum accounts have been hacked and that he's not the one who stole the money--he even complained that HE was the victim! People didn't believe him, and they started "bashing" him and continued their investigations. And they were right to do so. Even if by now everything is still not clear, it appears that a small but widening group of online poker players, using multiple forum accounts, have been trying to do that same money transfer scam on different poker forums (even on the well known 2+2 forum) along with some regular colluding scams at the poker tables. And they used to have their "meeting point " on and IRC channel.

Tell me about a dirty story!

Right now, with all the pressure and the investigation by the forum's administrators and contributors, the original victim has been refunded half of the
money ($250) and the pseudo scammer-victim has been banned. But what's quite interesting is all this undercover stuff that seems to have emerged so far. Who said that poker online is safe? You can't even trust your poker forum buddies!

And then a third forum contributor posted to say that he was also scammed out of $75, again by the same guy using the same money transfer technique. The only reason he didn't inform of it earlier was because he didn't want to "rat for such a small amount..." I guess it's more because he was ashamed to be conned like this!

What in the world will happen next in the world of online poker??