Equity Poker Network Stops a Collusion Ring

Earlier this month, the Equity Poker Network discovered the evidence of chip dumping and took appropriate action against the perpetrators, successfully shutting down their accounts. Room’s fraud team identified the suspicious behavior between the four players at the tables.

This scam was spotted on September 22, by a representative on 5Dimes (a network skin) and it was noticed that that large sum of money was incorrectly credited to an online account on September 17th.

The analysis of hand histories for the four questionable accounts revealed that a 5Dimes player had been dumping chips consistently to the three Full Flush Poker players who were supposed to withdraw thousands of dollars from their player accounts.

This was not the first incident at the Equity Poker Network and not the first time that its investigators had discovered and put an end to fraudulent activities amongst players on its network by shutting down their accounts immediately.

According to their press release, EPN took all necessary precautionary measures to safeguard its network and to protect their players and the integrity of their bankrolls.

Chip dumping is ethically questionable and often flat-out scummy and it is not permitted by online poker rooms

'Chip dumping' stands for intentional loss of chips or cash to another player for the purposes of cheating and the most common reason for chip dumping is to aid a friend or associate at the poker table by giving them more chips.

If you are a professional poker player, this does not make much sense because it is in your interest to take the money by winning a hand in a right way, but amateurs are usually addicted to this kind of scam.

The most common scenarios when chip dumping occurs:

1. Tournament play

2. Online Cash Game play

Detecting chip dumping in a tournament depends on how sophisticated the players are and it can be very easy or very hard to detect. For example, we have one player “A” who bought in himself and three other players in tournament. The three other players have been instructed to chip dump to player “A” and this allows him to accumulate his stack without any risk and give himself a better chance of winning the tournament.

Mechanics of dumping are quite simple; players usually make stupidly large bets with trash hands, or make large bets, only to fold on a later street to a tiny bet, a bet which any player who knows pot odds or poker basics would quickly call.

In online cash game play, the chip dumping is done to move money from one person to another. Online poker sites will ban players who chip dump in cash games if they are caught as this kind of behavior usually trigers numerous red flags.