2024 WSOP Bracelet Winner Antonio Galiana Accused of $94K Online Poker Scam

Table Of Contents

Elaborate Alleged Scheme
Galiana Responds to Accusations

UPDATE: After this article was published, Antonio Galiana and Jason Philpott of Team651 announced on June 16 that they had “resolved this matter to everyone’s satisfaction.” Galiana retracted his previous statement that is published in this article.

After pulling off the potential bluff of the summer at the 2024 World Series of Poker, Antonio Galiana quickly became an internet poker darling following his heads-up triumph over poker vlogger Johan Guilbert in Event #34: $2,500 Freezeout No-Limit Hold’em.

Galiana pipped the Game of Gold star to the WSOP bracelet and the $439,395 first-place prize — a win that was highlighted by Galiana’s five-bet bluff shove with just seven-high.

However, as the confetti settled and the bright lights of the Thunderdome at Horseshoe and Paris, Las Vegas dimmed, serious accusations surfaced. Galiana allegedly orchestrated a complex scam involving a fake website and fabricated poker results, stealing nearly $100,000 from a poker stable.

Elaborate Alleged Scheme

In a Two Plus Two post from October 2018 that resurfaced after Galiana’s bracelet victory, Jason Philpott, co-founder of the Spin & Go staking group Team651, explained that Galiana had been part of the stable that “offer(s) EV deals to players; essentially the player is paid a certain % of their EV in all games played.”

Philpott, who uses the screen name “fightingcoward”, alleged that Galiana and another Spanish player named Raul De Vega Sanchez “stole and defrauded us (Team651) of $94,180.70 over the course of the last 12 months, using a scam designed to fake Spin & Go hand histories and audits on Pokerstars.com and exploit an EV deal that was in place for both named players.”

Additionally, Philpott said they believed that a third account, “JackandJazz777,” which belonged to Juan Jesus Del Pino Campos, was “a multi-account set up by Raul and Galiana.” They do not believe Campos was involved in the scam.

Philpott explained that Team651 offers players “EV deals” where “essentially the play is paid a certain % of their EV in all games played.” At the end of each month, the team’s manager reviews each player’s results and calculates their EV.

“Raul was adamant that our deal be kept private due to Spanish law about gambling, and all three of them requested that the EV report be compiled on their PC as to keep complete control of their hand history,” Philpott wrote in the 2018 post. “Our manager would teamview into their computer, watch them download the (fake) link from PokerStars, and compile the EV report in Pt4 (PokerTracker 4).”

The team eventually grew suspicious after “checking with our highest volume players and them saying they’d never seen them on the tables” and discovering the audits they were sending “were entirely fake.”

“They had been tampered with to appear legitimate, and the names/results were changed in order to look like they had been played by these three players at the higher stakes.”
An allegedly faked tournament report from Antonio Galiana
A PokerStars email regarding Antonio Galiana
“The players had used a spoof URL (changing ‘rationalwebservices’ to rationalswebservices) and created a website perfectly imitating the audit site for Pokerstars. Raul, Galiana, and Juan all had uploaded fake audits to our audit software to defraud us of the $94,180.70 over the course of the last year.”

Team651 also contacted a “well-known Spanish player” who previously ran a team of Spanish Spin players and “immediately realized” that Raul “had done the same scam on him.”