Back in the 2000, when online poker was still relatively new and largely unheard of, a man named Federico Schiavio, an IT employee of Binion's Casino, bought a website name. He went to godaddy.com and bought the domain, meaning that he could put a website there. The name of the website was WSOP.com. At the same time, it was rumored that Schiavio began building online poker software. In 2004, Harrahs wasn’t too happy to find Schiavio encroaching on their brand. As a result, in March of 2004 Harrahs began legal action against Schiavio for the WSOP.com domain.
In April of 2004, a company named Dimensus Ltd was put together as the parent company of an up an coming online poker room, Pitbull Poker. (pitbullpoker.com). Shortly thereafter, an arrangement was apparently made between Shiavio and his website WSOP.com and Pitbullpoker.com. It was rumored that the guys at Pitbull Poker even used Shiavio’s software, the software he was alledgedly creating back in 2000.
Enter Kevin Baronowsky: according to the online poker sleuths at 2+2 Baronowsky owns a few websites of his own. There’s pherx.com website that sells pherehormone’s and a couple typo domains, such as pitbullpokr.com and xardplayer.com. Both of the two typo websites redirect to pitbullpoker.com (meaning if you go to xardplayer.com your computer will automatically take you to pitbullpoker.com).
Now let’s look as the online poker players at 2+2 have at an Internet screen name, dsscanuck, a user name used online at a forum that talks about receiving satellite television illegally. There’s a person on that forum that shares with the community that he was busted for selling illegal satellite equipment. He turned state and provided evidence about his clients to the government to save his own skin.
If you check out dsscanuck.com you’ll be greeted by banners for pherx.com as well as eczemaderm.com. So what’s eczemaderm.com? eczemaderm.com is a website that sells steroid cream. What does that have to do with this particular conspiracy theory? Absolutely nothing. However, eczemaderm.com is hosted on the very same servers as pherx.com and none other than WSOP.com.
Now, in addition to all of this fascinating information, there has been online poker cheating allegations made against Pitbull Poker concerning superusers seeing hole cards. Players have also allegedly asked Pitbull Poker for hand histories, delivered in a format that they could use. The online poker website allegedly refused to deliver. In fact, as of today, you just flat out cannot have an online hand history. So no one’s saying there are superusers, nothing's been proven, but some people might be saying that Pitbull is making it awfully difficult to prove or disprove their existence.
So, is your money really safe at this online poker room?
The parent company of Pitbull Poker was apparently dissolved on March 10th, 2009. So, as far as the folks at 2+2 can discern, there is no owner! A poster on 2+2“PBDave” says that the ownership was transferred to a company based in Cyprus. No records have been produced to support this claim.
Dimensus, the former parent company never actually had a gambling license, however, the company claims to be in Costa Rica, where they actually wouldn’t need one. But Pitbull claims to be a UK Company. The UK Gaming commission has been informed of the possibility of an illegal gambling business.
I don't think this will grow into an UltimateBet-size online poker cheating scam, but a lot of shit went on here and we will be hearing about this more!
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