ACR CEO Phil Nagy Outs Twitter Blackmailer

If you’re planning to blackmail the boss of one of the biggest poker sites in the world, doing it publicly on Twitter is probably among the dumbest ideas out there – and Americas CardRoom boss Phil Nagy wasted no time in outing the scoundrel...

The threat to go running to Joe Ingram relates to the podcast guru’s investigation into bots a couple of years back, an industry-wide problem that Nagy and others have been attempting to solve.

Trolls and Conspiracy Theories

As with partypoker head honcho Rob Yong, taking a public interest in answering the day-to-day concerns of running a poker site clearly also makes it open season for the trolls and ne-er-do-wells that haunt the Twittersphere.

Indeed, the would-be blackmailer carried out his threat to contact Ingram, another public tweet that showed the OP up as one of poker’s conspiracy theorists.

Nagy has been plagued by a fake Twitter account recently as well, a clone of his WPN_CEO Twitter trademark doing the rounds with spurious and outlandish troll claims.

Hacking and Swatting

It’s not the first time that poker’s biggest names have been hacked or cloned, though, as we reported on Doyle Brunson suffering a similar fate back in 2015.

With Brunson having around 400,000 followers on Twitter, the offensive tweets sent out under his name caused a bit of a stir, and a couple of years later several more pros were in the same boat.

Vanessa Selbst, Vanessa Rousso, Cate Hall and Dan Smith all had various accounts hacked, with Rousso’s involving what could have been a serious ‘swatting’ attempt, as we reported here.

At least there was no blackmail involved, but not all poker players have been so fortunate.

Sebok and the Sex Pics Scandal

The most famous of all involved Joe Sebok, whose email account was hacked, with compromising nude and sex pics stolen.

What followed was an amateur-hour blackmail attempt that eventually led to three people charged with conspiracy and blackmail, two of them receiving prison sentences.

Sebok refused to pay the various demands, an initial $100k changed to $60k plus $5k every year to keep the photos away from public view.

Although the FBI quickly closed in on the blackmailers, they couldn’t prevent the pics being sent to more than one hundred of Sebok’s friends and peers in the poker world.

For Sebok, the son of Barry Greenstein, it proved to be a nightmare, stating in court that:

"The episode instantly damaged my ability to sustain my livelihood doing what I had been since 2005.”

The Ultimate Bet-sponsored pro explained:

“In short, I was no longer able to maintain my then-current level of participation in the poker industry, representing the brands that I had been previously, as well as greatly destroying my ability to do so with new companies moving forward.”

Sebok, who had close to $2million in tournament earnings prior to the blackmail incident, added:

“Without belaboring the point too much, it was a nightmare, and one that I was forced to live through with millions of people watching.”