Online poker club Fox Poker, one of the longest-running private poker app clubs, has shut down amid huge controversy with founder and main owner Andy Troumbly admitting to gambling away $1.5million in “fake chips”
About Fox Poker
Fox Poker was one of a number of sites that run on PokerMaven software, with Troumbly running the poker club primarily via a FaceBook page for members.
Ostensibly a play-money site, agents conduct real money transactions, and rumours had been mounting within the poker community that something was amiss.
Player cashouts were reportedly slowing down, sometimes as little as $300 being paid out when the limit was supposedly around $17,000 per month.
Admins of the group investigated and found that Troumbly had been loading non-deposited chips onto the site to the tune of roughly $1.5million since April of this year.
He then went on to lose the lot in highstakes cash games, which meant there was a massive shortfall in actual cash to back up the site’s liquidity.
One of the admins, believed to be Alex Shelow, shared a whistleblowing post online, and although it was quickly deleted, others had already saved it…
Discussions on 2plus2
With the site shut down and players desperately trying to find out what was happening with their Fox Poker bankrolls, several took to the 2plus2 forum to air their grievances.
“I participated in a big game on this site, played a lot for 3 weeks, won about $ 180k,” claimed ‘lealeks’ whose nickname on FoxPoker was ‘Voidwar’.
“Since May, I have not received cashouts, and before that there were constant delays with payments and they paid ten times less than they should have. There were attempts to accuse us of unfair play in order not to pay the money, but in the end they said that everything was fair.”
Another, known as ‘nvragain’ on the forum, claimed to have $125k on the site when it shut, having joined “mostly because of one player, named DIAMONDHANDZ, who played both PLO and NLHE extremely bad.”
That player turned out to be Troumbly, who had devised several usernames and logins with which to flood the highstakes games with “illegal” chips.
All this was simply allegation, conjecture and rumour until Andy Troumbly himself made a video statement, admitting partial responsibility for what transpired…
Fox Poker owner Andy Troumbly’s apologizes
His apology of sorts didn’t go down too well with the poker-playing public, one who claimed to have played against Troumbly’s fake accounts pulling no punches.
“This guy spends the entire video trying to deflect blame,” wrote YT user Eric Durant, adding: “Bro, when you gave yourself all those free chips you literally stole that amount of money from the players. This video is disgusting.”
One of Troumbly’s attempts at deflecting the blame included a claim that a former admin, named by Troumbly as Adam Willis, had left the site while owing $120,000.
At the moment, it appears that player balances will not be honoured and Poker Fraud Alert founder, Todd Witteles (aka Dan Druff) has warned about other sites potentially linked to Troumbly’s Fox Poker.
“I’m also hearing about two new sites which have come up: ActionCardz and Bluff Shove,” wrote Witteles on a thread titled “Fox Poker online private site is DOA.”
He added: “I would strongly caution against playing on either of these sites – and not just for the usual reasons when it comes to private poker sites. I have been told (but not yet verified) that some of the same admins from Fox Poker are involved with ActionCardz and Bluff Shove.
He also warned players away from a Facebook group, “Poker4Breakfast”, which he believes is promoting ActionCardz.
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