First of all let's explain how Ongame Network works. The main goal of the network is leading people into depositing real money into online accounts where players should lose their money as soon as possible. Ongame's policies always try to attract players that are willing to lose all their money without making questions. When you do it the money goes to offshore accounts and your country loses track of the money so there is no legal way to get it back unless they return it to you voluntarly. Please look at the following diagram to understand how this business works.
1 - Real deposits
2 - Heavy advertisement from affiliates and big companies like: BestPoker, Betfair, Betsafe, Betsson, bwin, CasinoEuro, CoralPoker, EuroBetPoker, EuroPoker, EuroSportBet, GalaPoker, GoalWin, GuruPlay, Heypoker, HollywoodPoker, PAF, Poker.gr, PokerIdol, PokerLoco, PokerRoom, RedKings, ScandicBookmakers, SmartLivePoker and Whitebet.
3 - Operators give a slice of their profit to affiliates.
4 - All operators share their players database to player poker under Ongame software.
5 - Ongame provides poker software and deal with everything that is related to poker.
6 - Regulators publish websites and short documents (usually one page document) to give a good image to operators. No regulator has ever find any sign of fraud of poker operators and networks. Only groups of players have managed to find some serious frauds over the years.
7 - Operators and networks pay a fee to receive the regulator blessing.
This way Ongame will hold absolute power without any serious regulation under offshore accounts. The number you see when you login to your account probably doesn't even exist anymore. But you won't ever know it because usually you will gamble all your money and you won't withdraw the full amount. So there is always liquidity to pay the small volume of withdrawls. Let's take a look where all this millions of $ in deposits will go in the following diagram.
As you can see there is only a small part of money that is converted to rake. And that small amount of money has to be shared between so many. The profit from rake is good but not attractive enough when you have to split it among so many poeple. If a player loses his money very quickly he won't generate much rake. So why does Ongame want "fishs" if they will lose their money faster generating less rake than regular players? The answer is very simple, fishs won't ever understand the third diagram. They have no idea of what is going on, they will blame luck when the truth is that Ongame has a good extracting system to take away that huge slice called "players funds" without sharing it with no one!
Please take a look at the third diagram and understand that this is the most effective way to extract money from the network.
In the history of online poker there have been several attempts from network insiders to steal the big slice "players funds". Some have managed to do it like in the Absolute Poker scandal. It is very important to understand that the most effective way to do it is by creating accounts winning to legit players through illegal ways and then cash the money out as if those accounts were legit players when in fact they were players from the network itself. Of course that some fraudsters will do it in more discrete ways than others.
Collusion - One of the best ways to steal money from the network is by creating a massive number of colluder accounts. You can take a very good edge over other players.
Chip Dumping - Withdrawing money from fewer accounts is better. It avoids a lot of work since the final destination of the money will be bank accounts and it is easier if you have to deal with less accounts. Also it allows Ongame the possibility of money laundering millions of $.
Super Users - The method is very obvious. By taking an unfair advantage like seeing all cards you can extract very easily money from other users. This wasn't investigated by Poker Guardians since it is a very hard fraud to prove when you have limited information. If there was a serious regulator it would be possible to avoid super users. Even though Poker Guardians picked an example of two players that probably fit in this category.
Other methods - Poker Guardians only focused on the 3 above methods but it is obvious that without a serious regulation networks of fraudsters have an extended list of methods to extract money from the network since the more methods are applied the less likely they are to get caught.
