US Poker Gaming Sites Get More Time to Respond To Players
The three online US poker gaming companies whose domain names and assets were seized by the US Department of Justice on Black Friday, April 15th, have been granted more time to respond to the amended complaints issued against them. While US poker players wait to get their funds back, these sites are working on getting back on their feet.
On November 30, PokerStars, Absolute Poker and Full Tilt Poker were granted extensions to file their responses to the amendments issued on September 21.
The original complaint had indicted the people running Full Tilt Poker of various charges including bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. The amended federal complaint says they are guilty of a trans-national Ponzi scheme through which they illegally siphoned off millions of dollars belonging to players.
Preet Bharara, a US lawyer, stated that FTP’s Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Rafe Furst and CEO Ray Bitar ran a huge Ponzi scheme spread across countries and that they stole players’ money to the tune of $444 million to pay themselves. He claimed that they had lied systematically, both to the players and to the public, about how safe and secure the money deposited with them was.
FTP’s cash flow problems began as early as the beginning of 2010. Instead of coming clean and informing its customers, FTP continued to credit players’ accounts with money that basically did not exist. FTP later agreed that it had been facing financial problems.
The companies should have originally responded to the changes made by November 30. In the meantime, Howard Lederer and Rafe Furst followed the lead of Chris Ferguson and the CEO and moved the court invoking Rule G5 of the Supplemental Rules for Admiralty and Maritime Claims. Like Ferguson and Bitar had done earlier, they too claimed the funds in the different seized bank accounts. This move was announced by the court on November 28.
Ferguson, in particular, has issued multiple motions in court; one of them is to grant permission for an out-of-state attorney to be his defense lawyer.
A slew of other motions are in the names of various companies which together comprised FTP. The gist of all these motions is that the money in the accounts of these companies which were seized by the DoJ in reality belonged to the companies and that these funds should be returned. He is stating that these funds were players’ money and that they were either being transferred via FTP from the players to these accounts or they were funds that in the process of being returned to players. The DoJ is alleging that FTP never kept players’ money separately and that the money was used to pay the owners and the directors.
Eventually, orders were filed which gave the three companies further time till January 2 to give their response to the amended complaint. Three copies were filed, one for each indicted company. The copies are available at the websites of the three companies.
-
Recent Tips for Real Money Poker Players:
