Partypoker closes 306 cheating accounts during 2021

Haley Hintze
Published by:
Posted on: January 27, 2022 1:20 am EST

Partypoker’s ongoing efforts to eradicate cheaters from its online platforms is ongoing, and the online-poker giant has released details about its anti-cheating activity during the 2021 calendar. From January through December of 2021, partypoker identified a total of 306 accounts that had committed at least one form of cheating. A total of $47,344 was seized from those accounts and distributed to players negatively impacted by the cheating.

While most major online sites continually screen their sites’ activity, monitoring for cheating players in various ways, partypoker is one of a very few that makes those cheating findings public. Partypoker began making public reports in December 2018, and to date has seized more than $1.9 million and returned those funds to cheated players.

Both the number of cheating accounts identified and the amounts confiscated shrunk dramatically throughout 2021. It’s a sign that party’s continuing efforts have served as a negative deterrent. Here are the month-by-month totals — in accounts frozen and total funds confiscated — through partypoker’s anti-cheating operations (source: partypoker):

  • Jan 2021 25 $4,275
  • Feb 2021 39 $4,636
  • Mar 2021 40 $5,980
  • Apr 2021 46 $1,736
  • May 2021 26 $11,283
  • June 2021 20 $1,359
  • July 2021 22 $1,268
  • Aug 2021 8 $117
  • Sept 2021 16 $3,530
  • Oct 2021 30 $8,779
  • Nov 2021 19 $794
  • Dec 2021 31 $3,587

For 2021, that roughly averaged just over 25 accounts and a little over $11,000 seized per month. While the number of accounts seized per month has slowly trended lower (the all-time monthly high was 142, in March 2019), the dramatic difference has been in the amounts seized from the cheating accounts. In its first few months, partypoker’s anti-cheating crackdown confiscated several thousand dollars, on average, from each account. For 2021, that figure was less than $150 per account subject to confiscation.

Partypoker did not specify in its recent update which sites contributed what percentages of the seized-account numbers to the year’s totals. In earlier years, party’s updates offered some differentiation between cheating accounts identified on its global dot-com site, as compared to those frozen on its separate shared-liquidity site for players in France and Spain.

Partypoker’s seized-account figures in prior years have never included any possible seizures involved with the operation of the Partypoker US Network in three regulated U.S. states, and by extension, any such seizures are likely not included here if they exist. Those U.S.-based sites’ operations are done in partnership with land-based casinos in each of the three states and any findings of cheating would be subject to different reporting protocols.

Featured image / data source: partypoker