Now if you’d really invented a piece of software that could see your opponents’ hole cards, would you:

a) Keep quiet about your discovery, play high stakes poker and make millions and retire within the year?
or
b) Spend time and money making the software available to download so that everyone knows what you’re doing and your scam is exposed to the world?

The fact is your opponents’ hole cards are only ever in two places – on their PC or on the operator’s servers. The information is never beamed to your PC – you only get your cards – so to get it you’d have to hack into another location. And anyone selling software publicly that enabled you to hack remotely into another system would be arrested, tried and most likely thrown into a cell for a very long time.

Some scam sites merely take your money and point you towards freely available and legitimate software, like TightVNC, which enables you to remotely control someone else’s desktop. While this would give you the opportunity to see your opponents’ cards, you’d actually need them to be running a copy of TightVNC as well and you’d need their IP address and password. Tricky.