Partypoker has published its latest numbers regarding accounts closed for various forms of cheating on its global and ring-fenced western European platforms, continuing the platforms policy of making public the number of cheating accounts and funds seized from players who have violated party's Terms of Service (ToS).
In March 2022, the most recent month for which party has published tallies for shuttered accounts, the Entain-owned sites closed 41 accounts and confiscated a smallish collective amount of $2,374. In February, by comparison, party shut down another 41 cheating accounts, but for a much larger total of $11,050.
Partypoker does not publicize for exactly which offenses accounts are closed, though typical violations include, botting, collusion of various types, and the use of banned software (real-time assistance). Partypoker also does not publicize the screen names or real names of the players whose accounts have been terminated and balances (if available) seized, in accordance with European Union-wide data-privacy mandates.
The platform also no longer differentiates its report based on cheating accounts banned from its global dot-com site, or from its ring-fenced offerings in France and Spain. Before late 2018, party issued tallies separately for the global and France/Spain groups. Partypoker's regulated offerings in North American are subject to separate regulatory requirements, and in the case of the U.S., have never been included in partypoker's monthly banned-account tallies.
Winter months an increased time for online cheating?
Even though party's published data set on banned accounts is tiny, with the above page dating back only to December 2018, it appears to show that online cheating, like online-poker play itself, has seasonal variance. For the first three months of 2022, party has banned 104 accounts and confiscated nearly $15,000.
From October through December of 2021, party banned another 80 accounts, while during the summer months, party has acted upon fewer overall cheating accounts. In the fall and winter months of late 2020 and early 2021, party again had banned a somewhat higher number of accounts.
Overall, partypoker has banned a slightly smaller number of cheating accounts each month, showing that its publicized anti-cheating efforts have had at least some detrimental effect. Separately, in the wake of high-stakes cheating allegations largely centered on rival site GGPoker, partypoker's Juha Pasanen issued a statement explaining how its game-integrity team operates, investigating possible instances of cheating. As with other sites, partypoker uncovers a majority of cheating instances internally, though player complaints also account for a share of identified and banned cheating accounts.
Pasanen's statement followed a separate post of his on the topic of a possible global online-poker blacklist that would be designed to block known online cheaters from moving from one site to the next. However, regulatory and jurisdictional concerns would likely make such a blacklist all but impossible to implement fully and effectively, something that Pasanen himself acknowledged. Still, operators and the vast majority of players alike would like to see ever-more-effective measures put into place to rid online poker of its cheating elements.
Featured image source: partypoker
