r/interestingasfuck • u/lonewolff321 • 12h ago

An online poker bot farm where dozens of synced laptops collude at the same table against real players

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u/comrad1980 11h ago

Why individual computers? I would virtualize and automate this. Makes it even more scalable.

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u/AlwaysAtBallmerPeak 11h ago

I'm guessing because the poker clients do device fingerprinting to detect bots, and faking that with VMs is incredibly difficult.

Probably they run on different internet connections as well

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u/audigex 10h ago

I’d assume something like a residential proxy per machine - dodgy ones (where you don’t ask whether the person who’s confection being used knows about it) can cost less than a couple of bucks a month

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u/adampm1 10h ago

I doubt faking it is hard. if they’re spending the money to invest in this, they’re going to spend a grand to develop something like that.

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u/fieldbotanist 9h ago edited 9h ago

https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity

It is very hard. Hardware-backed attestation has advanced beyond just spoofing a MAC

Also IP reputation. An ISP or service can use AI to flag your network as a botnet network

So a smart service can use a combination of hardware backed attestation and IP reputation to like a detective deduce you are a bot

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u/adampm1 9h ago

As such when one tech advances, others follow suit.

That’s also assuming they are using that specific platform.

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u/fieldbotanist 9h ago

In time yes. But a lot of people today think how easy it is to spin a botnet farm.

You said in your earlier comment faking it is easy

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u/adampm1 7h ago

If we’re going to be pedantic about it, I said “I doubt faking It would be hard”. But realistically, when it comes to the conversation as a whole, the understanding is that faking it is only one solution to the problem where there’s multiple solutions to the problem.

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u/randylush 8h ago

I would be really surprised if there is kernel-level anticheat for these poker companies, but it's definitely possible.

Even still, you shouldn't need to have them all open and arranged at tables like this; you could at least equip each one with VNC and be able to control them all from one workstation. Seems much easier to do that than to dance around the whole place

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u/ReporterCalm6238 11h ago

To bypass antibot system

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u/Chimie45 10h ago

You would be banned before you even joined a table on any real site.

When you play, they have full access to everything you're running on your computer, they have full access to your desktop, they know your system specs, they know it's a virtual machine.

Trust me, there are online games where people win quite literally millions of dollars. If it was as easy as "just run a VM" there would be lots of people doing it. And yet they're not.

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u/comrad1980 10h ago

and with access to the full system they cannot find out that a bot software is running the game?

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u/DerGottesknecht 10h ago

If the bot commands come via emulated keyboard/mouse from an external controller it gets difficult. You'd need to analyze the mouse movements to find out if it's a bot. 

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u/tetyys 9h ago

it's almost like hardware can be emulated to appear like it's a real thing

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u/DerGottesknecht 9h ago

Some hardware, HIDs are easy and almost undetectable, but gpu emulation is difficult. 

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u/Chimie45 10h ago

They absolutely can. And do. Simple bots like in the OP wouldn't even make it a day before getting banned and their money taken.

It's more profitable for the operator to ban and confiscate the money than to let the bots play. If you let the bots play you only get their rake. If you ban them, you get all their money.

People do some truly insane shit to get past the anti-cheat. I'm talking double air gapped web cam voice controls and shit like that.

A simple VM is not going to work.

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u/lgastako 9h ago

It's more profitable for the operator to ban and confiscate the money than to let the bots play. If you let the bots play you only get their rake. If you ban them, you get all their money.

You get all their money once. But if you take their rake, you get their rake all day every day in perpetuity. And the rake of all the other people that are playing on your site because you have a site that always has "players" to play against.

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u/Chimie45 8h ago

I guess it might have been on another post, but the point I made is that what you're saying only would happen on smaller sites, or russian crypto sites, things like that. The large operators, like GG, Stars, WPT, Coin... don't need to do this. There are plenty of games going at all times. That is, unless you're playing something weird like PLO5 10k Buy-ins... But bots aint playing that either.

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u/intangibleTangelo 10h ago

meh. there are plenty of people with the skills to pull this off

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u/Chimie45 10h ago

GGPoker just bought the WSOP for $500,000,000. Do you think they also don't have the skills, as well as the money or interest to find people to stop this?

If you've got the skill to do this, you're not doing it at the big shops.

People don't go to Caesars Palace to try and palm dice at craps. You do it at the tiny back-alley casinos.

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u/r3dm0nk 9h ago

it's cheaper (as in, instantly generating money) and faster to buy some second hand market shit laptops that just need to run a flash equivalent of app, than it is to sit and develop a working vm that will need to be constantly keep up to date with anti-cheating measurements - to put it very simply, as its late and im tired too much to explain using big words

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u/Pilvikas 11h ago

A guy is clearly amateur that is running this

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u/DenormalHuman 10h ago

lol. You guys have obviously never considered what this takes seriously at all. How are you going to get all your VM's appearing on different networks if your host only has one outbound internet connection they are all sharing?

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u/Pilvikas 10h ago

Proxies? Faking hardware is the harder part

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u/jake04-20 9h ago

How are you going to get all your VM's appearing on different networks if your host only has one outbound internet connection they are all sharing?

Easily, and the fact that you think that part in particular is complex or difficult shows how little you know about the topic lol.

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u/DenormalHuman 6h ago

please explain. You effectively have a single gateway to the internet , and that gateway's IP is all the external internet sees of any network requests originating from your network.

you could do it with multiple VPN's, or external proxy services. I was excluding the use of external services, but they would work to be fair.

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u/EffectiveClock 6h ago

virtual nics on multiple vlans, routed via policy based routing over separate vpns?

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u/DenormalHuman 6h ago

yea, the VPN's are the enabler, but I was initially thinking without using external services or infra. However, if it works, then it works!

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u/BearelyKoalified 10h ago

It is kind of interesting they have monitors for each computer and many of the computers are laptops or other inefficient machines. Just to point out they are all likely on independent vpn connections, meanwhile connected via another local network app to communicate simultaneously - meaning they could easily aggregate all these onto one large screen or command screen without much extra work. If nothing else at least other machines would be way more heat and space efficient. I haven't done this with poker but I've done it with video games where you'd be easily detected via virtualization and not to rule out that you could virtualize this still with some advanced techniques but they could at least highly improve the efficiencies of this setup.

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u/tiagoscharfy 9h ago

Because of fingerprinting. With software bots, specialized fingerprinting anti fraud tools can easily detect, they know exactly how each vendor render things, graphics card, etc. with real device, everything is consistent, so there’s nothing to detect. Only way to detect would be by pattern basis or detecting the proxy they are using.