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Charlie Carrel Accusation Exposes The Dangers With Unregulated Poker Apps
‘I have a bridge to sell you’
In the late 19th century, New York City was bristling with potential and promise. Every day, thousands of plucky immigrants, mostly from Europe, sailed past Lady Liberty and arrived in the land of opportunity. One opportunity which was presented to many was the chance to purchase the Brooklyn Bridge..
A dapper-looking, silver-tongued man by the name of George C Parker would approach unsuspecting immigrants, engage them in casual conversation and then introduce himself as the owner of the bridge. He would say how he needed someone trustworthy to work in the booth and his unfortunate marks would invariably accept the offer of work. On arrival, his new employee would spot a sign which read: "Bridge For Sale".
Parker would then reveal that not only was the bridge was for sale but, for a reasonable price, it could be theirs to own and charge as they wished. In his office, which was conveniently set up beside the bridge, he showed them his forged counterfeit deeds and negotiate a price ranging from $75 to $50,000. It wasn't until the police showed up while the victims were erecting their toll booths that they realised the had been scammed.
Carrel Accuses Shaun Johnston
This week, British poker player and coach Charlie Carrel took to social media to blow the whistle on British Poker Series (BPS) Director Shaun Johnston’s alleged failure to honour a debt. In doing so, he has brought a big problem in online poker into sharp focus, namely the massive inherent risks associated with playing games on unregulated sites and the agent system as a way to conduct transactions.
Carrel claimed to have been working with Johnston who was providing him with players for online games on ClubGG. Carrel said that Johnston was deceptive, resulting in an unpaid debt of $60,000. It is unusual for a story like this to go public so quickly as it harms a victim’s chance of restitution but, after learning about Johnston’s poor reputation with other people in the community, Carrel decided that a public service announcement was the right thing to do.
Carrel has subsequently fleshed out his allegation with Pokernews Senior Editor Calum Grant. He pointed out that while unregulated app-based poker can be very lucrative, there is an explicit reliance on the efficacy of the game-runners and the trustworthiness of the agents involved. This really felt like the crux of the issue and credit to Grant who teased that aspect out.
Unregulated Poker
Unregulated poker has flourished in the post-Black Friday era, its growth accelerated by the monopolistic practices of Amaya era Pokerstars, the ring-fencing of European markets, the nanny-state laws in countries like Australia (Interactive Gambling Act of 2016) and China (Prohibition of online poker in June 2018) and turbo-charged by the Covid Lockdown poker boom.
For over a decade, poker apps, most of which are unlicensed, have been popping up with affiliates and agents merrily spamming the DMs of anyone with the word ‘poker’ in their bio. Lucrative games are promised to ‘club-members’, as are transaction workarounds and a wilful blind-eyedness to VPN-use for players from countries where online poker is banned.
Often, the games played on the apps are technically for ‘play money’ but those virtual chips correspond to real money amounts which are tallied by and settled with the agent separately. With these arrangements, lines of credit are not uncommon. Losers pay the agent while winners collect from the agent, via crypto-currency or cash transactions. The danger therein is twofold. Agents might not get paid by losing players who freeroll them. Winning players might not get paid by unscrupulous agents who rug them.
Scammer History
Poker has always been a game in which the players loan each other money, stake each other, swap action, conduct transfers and vouch for one another. Unfortunately, the game has a checkered history when it comes to high profile people failing to repay their debts. In a 2019 interview with Finnish poker website Pokerisivut, Patrik Antonius spoke out about 8-figures of outstanding poker loans. In doing so, he famously outed tech entrepreneur Robert Alexander for an old $700,000 poker debt. Then there was the sad case of Max Heinzelman who borrowed from dozens of poker players before his untimely death in 2017.
In 2015, Erick Lindgren filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in court, citing a cumulative debt load of more than $10 million and available assets of less than $50,000. In 2011, he was erroneously given a $2 million payment for services rendered by Full Tilt. A subsequent lawsuit claimed that he never returned the funds and became unreachable by company executives.
In 2012, Brad Booth fled the country without paying the money he owed to Doug Polk and other poker players. In March 2017, Polk made a video on the subject of scammers, referencing Booth and other bad debts that he had incurred:
Central to the debate within that video was the timing of when scammers should be exposed. Figuring out if other people are owed money is an important factor and one which certainly seemed to be part of the equation for Carrel who made his accusation public on Tuesday.
Cates on a mission
Kudos to Carrel who appears to have sounded the alarm quickly. Doing so undoubtedly hurts his chances of ever being repaid but crucially it does protect others. It’s also never an easy decision to besmirch a fellow poker player, knowing that doing so will damage the game itself. On this, Carrel expressed the idea that exposing bad actors can actually improve poker’s reputation, demonstrating that we self-police. He referred to the work of Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates who has been on his own mission to bring cases of scamming to light.
Cates, who was actually intending to promote the BPS before this story came to light, spoke to US Legal Poker Sites to convey his dismay with what happened to Carrel. He lamented the fact that Carrel didn’t come to him before hard-vouching for Johnston who he suspected did not have a lot of money. “I didn’t want it to be true, especially because Shaun has quite a network of people with the British Poker Series”, said Cates, adding that he tried to act as intermediary between Johnston and Carrel.
According to Cates, he suggested to Johnston that he give up the name of the player who lost at the tables and at least pay $300 to Carrel to show that he was serious about addressing the debt. When Johnston refused, Cates segued to a similar sounding story from months ago when he wasn’t paid $70,000. “This excuse by Shaun sounds very familiar… so it’s possible whoever set this up has scammed me in the past too”, he said.
Shady Shenanigans
Carrel met Johnston at the Aspers London stop of the BPS and Johnston subsequently offered to bring players to the ClubGG game that Carrel played. Chatting with Grant, Carrel acknowledged the precariousness of the situation. “This whole industry is built on reputation,” he stated, admitting that some poker clubs have been implicated in scams.
Carrel chose to put his faith in Johnston and believe his ‘hard-vouch’ for a player who went on to lose $60,000 at the tables. Describing what happened as “a lot of shady shenanigans”, he is still unsure whether the player who lost the money actually exists or if it was Johnston himself playing under a pseudonym.
Regardless and sadly for Carrel, the debt was not settled. Sadder still, there were indicators out there had he done his research into Johnston. A TwoPlusTwo Poker Forum post from 18 months ago referred to ‘failure to pay’ issues with him dating back to 2022 when he was agenting for the PP Poker app.
Black Friday 2
Over the last few years, a number of poker apps have become so successful, gobbling up so much market share, that they are now bigger than many of the regulated online sites. This is a problem. Aside from it being an unfair playing field for sites that have the licenses and follow the regulations, it means that the status quo for online poker nowadays is players trusting third parties who give the sites plausible deniability of criminality via one degree of separation, third parties that could steal from those players without consequence. People like Carrel and Cates are seemingly willing to take the associated risks but should they?
While these apps are not themselves pyramid schemes per se, they do provide a platform and infrastructure upon which pyramid schemes can be created. If a player is extended a line of credit and refuses to pay, the agent has no legal recourse. If an agent goes rogue, the player is not protected. To be fair, a few of these apps are making strides to conduct their businesses more legitimately, hiring security teams and attempting to become or at least be perceived as white label operators. There has, however, been no relent when it comes to turning a blind eye to VPN use and the deployment of the agent system.
In fact, it has gotten so blatant that people who play on these apps no longer whisper about it. Far from concealing the fact that they are playing on unregulated sites, they advertise it. Black Friday may have happened overnight but it was the product of a long investigation by the US Department of Justice who spotted how brazen Full Tilt and Pokerstars had become, followed the money, flipped who they needed to flip and built a slam-dunk case. If you think that’s not happening right now, I have a bridge to sell you.
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