Darren Woods won his first World Series of Poker bracelet in 2011 and many believed that Woods would continue to do well on the poker circuit. 888.com signed him up as a poker ambassador and Woods spent a lot of him time playing online poker on the 888 website as well as other popular online poker websites.
Woods did rather well at online poker and had very profitable years between 2008 and 2012 and became rather popular in the online poker community. Woods manipulated most of the online poker websites by creating multiple player profiles and then used them to play multiple hands at the same poker table, giving him an unfair advantage to beat the system. Woods collaborated with his father to defraud these online poker websites out of large sums of money.
However, Woods eventually got caught and was arrested after charges were filed against him in 2014 when the Online Poker fraud case was open. He initially denied all 13 of the charges filed against him which included defrauding online poker websites and online poker players who had no idea they were playing against the same individual who had multiple user names at the same table. Woods finally admitted to a UK court that he had indeed committed online poker fraud and was guilty of all 13 charges.
The UK court sentenced Woods to jail time and also asked him to pay back £1 million to the victims he manipulated. The money will be used to compensate both online poker websites and online poker players that suffered because of Wood’s devious scheme. The court has also informed Woods that if he fails to pay back £1 million, then he will have to serve 6 years in jail as punishment for his crimes.
The judge came down hard on Woods and told him
You are an intelligent, able and even gifted young man but you turned your talents towards defrauding online gambling companies and cheating other players of online poker. In individual games, other people playing against you stood to lose money because the odds had been rigged in your favour by the creation of multiple identities which were undisclosed to other players.
The 29 year old woods confessed to creating and operating around 50 online poker accounts along with his father and used them to successfully con other poker players at the table and gain an unfair advantage.
