The Hendon Mob Ready To Initiate Lawsuit Against Polish Finance Ministry

The world’s largest poker database, The Hendon Mob, has announced its intention to initiate legal proceedings against the Polish Finance Ministry for allegedly using bots to crawl its website and steal data, contrary to the website’s terms and conditions. The Global Poker Index (GPI) acquired The Hendon Mob in 2013 for $3 million, and commenting on the situation, GPI CEO Alex Dreyfus, said:

“Since December 29, we have seen a bot coming from the servers of mf.gov.pl that is crawling the whole website. We have tried to fight it, and we blocked it.”

Elaborating further on how The Hendon Mob has subsequently tried to foil the Polish Finance Ministry’s attempts to scrape the site for data, Dreyfus added:

“They have changed the bot’s Internet provider four times already. Our security team has noticed it from day one and, as we have a special tool that allows us to avoid automated bots to steal our data, we fed them with fake data and fake results for over eight days.”

Theft Of “Intellectual Property”

According to Alex Dreyfus, the Polish Finance Ministry has repeatedly been violating The Hendon Mob’s stated terms and conditions, and in particular the section which refers to “Intellectual Property”. As Dreyfus points out, it is clearly stated on the site’s sidebar that all information was “proprietary and owned by The Hendon Mob”, and as a result a hired Polish lawyer has now issued a warning and legal letter to the Finance Ministry.

Meanwhile, Dreyfus even took the opportunity to send the Deputy Polish Finance Minister Jacek Kapica a tweet this week requesting his ministry stops stealing his site’s data, with his twitter message as follows:

“Dear Finance Minister of Poland, please stop crawling/stealing data from The Hendon Mob. It’s illegal. Moreover due to our security procedure, the data you are crawling [is] not accurate. [It’s] fake data. We will sue if they used information for any claim.”

In response, the Deputy Finance Minister rather sheepishly replied; “I do not know about that, I’m on vacation.”

Validity Of Site’s Terms And Conditions

European law would also appear to support the position of Alex Dreyfus, especially with the EU Database Directive of 1996 clearly stating that “repeated and systematic extraction and/or reutilization of insubstantial parts of the contents of the database implying acts which conflict with a normal exploitation of that database or which unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the maker of the database shall not be permitted.”

Poland’s Restrictive Online Gambling Market

Poland has one of the most restrictive online gambling markets in the EU, with the country forbidding all online poker activity, but permitting online sports betting, albeit with just four licensed operators, all of which are Polish. Even these modifications to Poland’s Gambling Act in 2011 came only after concerted pressure exerted by the European institutions, including pressuring the country to allow citizens and licensed operators to use “other institutions authorized to operate payment accounts” including all the other online payment processors authorized by the European Union.

Despite its ongoing attempts to battle against unlicensed Internet gambling, it is estimated that Poland’s gambling restrictions could be costing the country around €142 million in annual missed tax revenues. It has therefore been suggested that Poland’s efforts would be better served by initiating a licensing process permitting these foreign operators to run games legally inside the country of 38.53 million, rather than attempting to compete against them.

Ministry Looking To Prosecute “Illegal” Gamblers

Needless to say, Poland’s gambling policy has earned the disapproval of the EU, especially with the country further impeding the free movement of trade across member states borders by openly going after what it considers to be “illegal” gamblers. In fact, the Ministry of Finance’s website makes reference to its activities in this regard, stating that 24,000 players have been identified as participating in “illegal” gambling activities, with criminal investigations already having been initiated against 1,100 of those players. The Ministry says it also intends to prosecute the country’s biggest winners, giving a possible indication as to its alleged actions related to The Hendon Mob’s database, and while The Hendon Mob list mostly live poker tournaments, it has also started recently posting some of the player’s online tournament results.