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The CalvinAyre.com website on Tuesday reported that PokerScout.com founder Dan Stewart attempted to blackmail Bodog Poker. Pay $1 million or remain on the PokerScout.com website, the CalvinAyre.com website alleges.
The news portal making the allegations is owned by Calvin Ayre, who just happens to be the founder of Bodog.
Bodog revealed last week it had developed software that is supposed to prevent traffic monitoring websites from “mining data” and presenting numbers in the form of rankings.
While Bodog Poker initially stressed its desire to keep so-called “sharks” from joining the site through PokerScout, the CalvinAyre.com website readily admitted they also feared becoming a target of the US DOJ.
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The US Department of Justice had just indicted the top 3 poker sites listed in the PokerScout.com rankings, the CA site points out at the time they approached Stewart about the Bodog exclusion.
The site relayed:
It wasn’t a time where poker companies wanted to raise their profile. It might have been putting a huge target on their chests. Potentially if Stars, Tilt and AP/UB had not been sitting at the top of these ranking sites, who knows if the DOJ would have had such a hard on to take them down.
Bodog approached Dan Stewart to be removed from the listings. Dan Stewart thought about the request and offered to take Bodog off his site BUT only if they paid Stewart a seven figure extortion payment.
This is an old school extortion racket by Stewart. He steals your data and uses it against your better interests in a money making scheme and if you don’t like it he needs over a million dollars to make your problem go away.
It’s like a bootlegger telling Steven Spielberg that he’ll stop selling illegal DVDs but only after Spielberg agreed to pay for the DVDs plus a big premium.
Bodog refused to make the extortion payment Stewart requested as they know he is taking their data without implicit permission and directly profiting from it.
On Tuesday, PokerScout.com listed Bodog as the 13th largest online poker room in the world, its highest ranking in well over two years. Bodog would be among the top 10 sites listed if not for the fact that PokerScout began segregating Italian and French market sites earlier this summer.
- Chris Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher
