On April 15, 2011, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York seized and shut down Pokerstars and several of its competitors' sites, alleging that the sites were violating federal bank fraud and money laundering laws.

Pokerstars uses various methods to detect and block VPN usage by players. These methods include: Blacklisting known VPN IP addresses: Pokerstars maintains a list of IP addresses associated with VPN servers. If a player attempts to connect to the website using one of these IP addresses, they will be blocked.