Posts Tagged ‘Hotel Arts’

EPT Barcelona Players fear their Rooms and Laptops were Compromised

Friday, September 6th, 2013

Just yesterday we discussed some news from EPT Barcelona regarding how Daniel Negreanu got upset over the “first card rule.” Now a new story might even top this since it involves breached hotel rooms, compromised laptops, and a possible inside job.

The reports started this morning when high stakes poker pro Jens Kyllonen discussed a scary ordeal on TwoPlusTwo. His keycard wouldn’t work on his hotel room at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona. So he spoke to reception, and they synced his card, thus allowing him to enter.

But Kyllonen discovered another problem when his laptop was missing from the desk. After asking the cleaning ladies if they moved it, the women said no and he was puzzled. So the Finnish pro went to talk to his friend, Henri, who also didn’t know anything about the laptop and couldn’t enter the hotel room with his card either.

When Kyllonen returned to the room, he found that his laptop had reappeared, which freaked him out because the person could’ve been hiding under the bed or somewhere else in the room. After running down and speaking to guest relations, Kyllonen was told that the cameras in his section weren’t working. His laptop then went missing again, and was later found in the lobby.

Long story short, Hotel Arts gave him the runaround and seemed to be more interested in hiding the whole incident rather than solving it. Additionally, the PokerStars staff was unable to convince the Hotel Arts staff to help out much. Kyllonen would later find that another player had his laptop stolen too.

It’s unclear exactly what the reason for stealing poker players’ laptops and putting them back in the room was. But popular speculation is that hackers were taking the computers to install Trojan viruses and uncover passwords and other sensitive information.

At this point, the Barcelona police have gotten involved and are trying to determine who the perpetrators were in this crime. Based on everything that was going on with the keycards, lack of security cameras and clueless cleaning ladies, an inside job can’t be ruled out in this instance.