Your money is not secure on Party Poker

[beanie]

In late December I had a family member want me to teach her to play poker, she had seen an ad for Party Poker and I helped her open an account. We opened the account at my house and used my beaniepoker@hotmail.com, I told her she could change it once she got to her computer (which she regrettably did not do), otherwise we would have to wait to play. This is where things fall apart. One of the people working for me at the time left on unpleasant terms. Apparently he accessed my e-mail and told www.partypoker.com that my family member died and he needed to change the account to a name that:

1. Did not have the same last name as my family member
2. Did not have the same address as my family member
3. In fact, there was literally no reason to believe that this person even knew my family member (which he didn’t)
4. They required no information whatsoever to give this person full access to my family members account.

I only noticed that the name had changed when I was transferring a friend money and I looked and saw that the account name had the name of the another person attached to it, the father of the person who left my employ disgruntled.

The long and short of this is, Party Poker gave someone access to $2000 of my family members money with nothing more than an e-mail. No supporting information at all. Now to get access to the account my family member has to send in this information:

1. Drivers License-seems reasonable, they likely want to prove she is not dead.
2. Preffered application-this is where things get interesting they want to be able to pull her credit so they can prove that she is not dead. Even though they did not ask this of the thief. They did ask the thief for his drivers license which he apparently obliged feeling that for $2000 he would gladly send in his father’s drivers license.
3. Police Report-this seems unreasonable to me, my family member feels like reporting that she was playing online poker might get her in trouble. Which I agree.

The person I spoke to at Party Poker was named Aravinda. This should trouble you if you have a Party Poker account, apparently all a thief needs to say is that you are dead and they can send in a drivers license and get all of the money in your account. Rather than doing the right thing once they saw a fraud was committed, they even told me that the person transferred the money out of the account to another account, they are putting my family member up to a level of scrutiny that they did not put the thief to. I have given her $2000 for her lost money. But if you have a Party Poker account your money is not secure.