A PokerStars employee apparently gripped by pseudo-religious, end of the world beliefs managed to spam an undetermined number of the site’s customers on Friday, forcing the company to issue a public apology and institute heightened controls on its emailing practices.
The spam, sent out via the pokerstars.eu mail servers by an employee in the company’s Isle of Man headquarters, included links to a small new-age website that warned visitors that the Age of Pisces would be ending on December 21, to be followed by three days of darkness when normal “electrical or metallic objects will [not] work.”
The resumption of normal electrical services, according to the website, would occur on Christmas Day, also supposedly the start of the new Age of Aquarius.
Presumably, this would have had an adverse effect on the December 23 edition of the Stars Sunday Million, in addition to other rake lost due to the electrical calamity.
Stars officials at first refused to believe that the spam in question had originated within their company, before checking out information posted at a debunking forum, godlikeproductions.com, that showed the small website’s owner was also listed as being employed in “Business Intelligence at PokerStars,” in addition to having misappropriated the use of the 'Stars mail server.
PokerStars soon after released an apology, admitting “one of our employees violated internal policies by accessing our marketing database and sending an unauthorized communication to a small number of player email addresses.”
“We identified the method that he used to circumvent our policy, and immediately implemented measures to ensure that no individual in the company can repeat this,” continued the email to affected customers.
An internal investigation has been launched, and “the specific employee’s access to any of our internal systems” has been temporarily revoked.
Stars also assured its customers that no sensitive personal data was released or accessed by the employee, and urged recipients to treat it as they would other spam—that is, to delete it.
“New Age” and Mayan-prophecy beliefs continue to draw attention in advance of the December 21, 2012 date when something is supposed to occur, despite extensive debunking of these claims by astronomers and historians around the globe. The weekend episode at Stars represents the first known instance of such belief systems forcibly interacting with the poker world.
18/12/2012, 9:22 am