The long-awaited expose’ by American television program “60 Minutes” about cheating in online gambling is scheduled to air this Sunday, November 30, 2008, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time in the USA.

PokerHelper.com previously reported that “60 Minutes” was investigating the issue and working on a segment about it for an upcoming telecast.

PokerHelper.com also reported that several people connected to the online poker industry, including poker journalists, had been interviewed by “60 Minutes” for the piece.

Although the segment had been rumored to run at various times over the past two months, it never did.

But now it’s definite, as CBS itself has announced the airing.

Here’s what an official CBS website says about the upcoming “60 Minutes” segment:

“A collaboration by two of the world’s most respected news organizations reveals how online poker players suspecting cheating were forced to successfully ferret out the cheaters themselves.

“That’s because managers of the mostly-unregulated $18 billion Internet gambling industry failed to respond to their complaints.

“The results of the four-month investigation by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen and The Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gilbert Gaul will appear this Sunday, Nov. 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.

“He was raising, just really, really bad hands against very good hands. He seemed to play crazy,” says Todd Witteles, a computer scientist turned poker player who believed he was losing too much to the same person. “It seemed like he was giving his money away.

“Except the only thing was, he wasn’t losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day,” Witteles, who played a key detective role, remembers.

“Michael Josem, a player and a computer security expert, plotted the odds of such consistent success. “We did the mathematical analysis to find that they were winning at about 15 standard deviations above the mean=85approximately equivalent to winning a one-in-a-million jackpot six consecutive times.”

“The cheating, which netted the cheaters more than $20 million, occurred on two of the Internet’s most popular sites, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The two sites operate out of a shopping mall in Costa Rica and run their games on computer servers housed on an Indian reservation outside of Montreal. They are licensed by a Mohawk tribe that has no background in casino gambling, a tribe that previously made the majority of its money selling tax-free tobacco. Though such gambling is illegal in both Canada and the U.S., the betting laws in those countries have no jurisdiction on the sovereign reservation.”

PokerHelper.com, as well as other poker media, has covered the cheating scandals in depth. Sunday will be the first time major mainstream media will tackle the issue. Presenting the story to a broad general audience for the first time, it will be interesting to see if any new information about the scandals are actually revealed on the program.

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.)