-The initial plan in the first quarter was to buy some time, push out with drawls for a time, expand into new markets, and eventually become profitable.

-Declining margins, increasing operating expenses, under estimated with drawls, declining traffic, and the rapid decline of new deposits has made this impossible. The company will fail and certain insiders know it.

-Lock is generating cash flow, but it is not profitable. There is money coming in, but expenses are higher. So, they are only paying essential expenses that keep the company operating. Wherever possible creditors and bills are not being paid and are being strung out as long as possible.

-One faction at Lock is operating under the theory that when they expand into new markets, they will generate new revenue and be able to turn things around. Another faction is operating under the theory that the company will fail and are designing a stalling strategy until the company collapses.

-Lock is comprised of many shell corporations and individuals who function as fronts to disguise ownership and to provide vehicles to inhibit creditors. Cipaco, Revolution, Cake, Lock, SDB Services. Lock may not own Cake, but that is a distraction. What matters is who controls the cash. That is a small group of insiders in Canada. The idea that JL is sole owner and CEO not entirely accurate. Just as M.J. Hugenholtzweg is not. JL gets a cut, but is not taking the largest slice of the pie and is a semi front person.

- Lock is not reconciling with the network. The way the companies are structured, Lock can point the finger at the network and the network can point the figure at Lock. But it’s the same people. A better way to look at it is that the skins are owed money. Around $4 million from last count.

- Lock will not be paying employees in an upcoming pay period. Excuses will be used, but the money is running out.

-2+2 was a huge problem for Lock. If you Google Lock and with drawls, cash outs, or scam you will get hits to the 2+2 forums. This is a big problem to acquire new customers and has crushed new deposits. Initially, they wanted to pull out after the ad flap, but certain factions felt that they could manage the issue.

-Shane’s performance was so poor and raised more problems that they pulled the plug and decided that a hide and seek approach was better. The plan is to run disinformation from their own site touting improved cash outs. Costigan will be a point man for this effort. The hope is to marginalize 2+2 and paint a more positive picture in the poker community.

-Lock had fund in Cyprus where they conducted banking transactions and they lost a significant sum.

-Funds are not segregated and never have been. All money went into one bucket and was then spent on operating expenses, player acquisition costs, and payments to ownership.

-Without an influx of capital from player deposits, Lock will collapse by year end.

I predict that some people from Lock will be coming into this thread fast and trying to paint OP as a troll, this especially includes Chris Costigan.

I do not know if OP is legit or not, one thing working against him is a lot of what he has stated is common knowledge and therefore hard to prove anything more than him repeating commonly known items, on the other hand a couple of things that make sense in his post I hadn't read before and I try to stay informed.

I think the most important step at this point is to maintain an environment of skepticism, while not dismissing OP completely and trying to engage the OP into providing more information that can help players in the long run, while shielding OP from any backlash from his employers.

OP, have the powers that be discussed any options that involve getting rid of VIP/rakeback etc. to try to pull themselves out of this mess?

Honestly despite it being a new account it all seems really legit.

Lock has had problems for months and there is no way to solve anything if the network and your skin are making less and less money (the whole network lost like 50% of the traffic doubt that Lock numbers are any better).
Doubtfull that they were able to cut costs at the same rate so they are probably even deeper in ****.

This is only matter of time when the whole network just collapse cause there is no other way given how big the backlog with withdrawals and reconciliation payemnts is.
It is hard to get any deposits if any thread on 2+2/elswhere is full of people waiting 6 months+ for their money.

stupid question but not sure the answer on it as well as i apparently thought I did, so if I have money on juicy or cake and lock goes under, this would essentially being the same thing as having my money on lock anyways?

I was always under the assumption that juicy/cake and lock were seperate cashiers, seperate entities, etc.

Yes and no.

It is the network model. Lets say you are on a skin that has more winners than losers they wait for the network to send them the money because they have negative cash flow (people win more than deposit) so at th other side of the equation are skins with more losers than winners(e.g. lock) who should sent the money to the network and the the network would send the money to the skins (reconciliation payments).

That is the reason why people at intertops are safe because they are a big bookie cause they still have positive cash flow so can pay their grinders from the money they got on sports betting/casino and don't rely that much on the money coming from the revolution network.

So basically people won a ton of money that never existed because expenses of skins like Lock and probably Cake to greatly exceeded the profit they were making from rake, hence the financial problems they have.

Theoretically they would be able to avoid problems but the network lost a ton of players so less rake and less deposits and less profit and doubtfull that they were able to cut costs at the same rate.

So players that play on skins with huge casino/bet on sport parts are safe (thanks to sites positive cash flow so they can eat loses from the collapse of the revolution network). Things that skins like Cake or Juicy have been disolved for quite a while and situation is getting only worse so with the collapse of the network they will collapse too.
So they are separate skins nad cashier but if the biggest losing skin (Lock) refuse to pay other skins everyone is in deep ****.

PrimordialAA would 100% disagree with all this. He feels things are turning around and got confirmation on this from someone who cannot tell a lie named Jen Larson on his all expenses paid trip to Portugal along with all the other pros.

Sounds plausible.

I'd LOVE to see this all verified in some way.

The stuff about Shane, 2p2, and the new forum seems pretty obviously true, anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together could see through their reasons for creating a new, closed, heavily moderated forum was to try to contain the damage done by a place where (*gasp*) customers could talk about their problems freely and without censor, and anyone (EVEN IF THEY DON'T HAVE MONEY ON THERE HOW DARE THEY!) could speak up about how bad this was.

All of this very plausible and perhaps even likely, but this is almost certainly a troll account.

I tend to give credence to OP's POV and here is why. I audited some very successful and some struggling companies in my career. Some had outstanding customer service and some had poor customer service. But in every case, they ALL wanted to have outstanding customer service. They all wanted to get better. When I look at Lock's moves, I see a company that doesn't care about customer service at all. Successful businesses all obsess about retaining existing customers and attracting new ones. You don't stay in business by driving away your customers. They are not behaving like a viable business. They are behaving like a Ponzi scheme, a boiler room operation, or an episode of American Greed. When a con starts to fall apart, they close up shop, shutdown communication, and leave town. I can not believe that any business that wants to stay in business would conduct itself in this manner. A CEO that hides, a Site Rep that lies and is continually caught in lies, and a customer service area that ignores messages and emails.

just sell the network to Intertops!

SGT RJ, any tie to this IP address with previous posters or regional info to help verify or disregard the claims?

Agree completely with this.

No matches, IP in Massachusetts.

hmm, personally I find it odd a supposed Lock employee would have a Mass IP address but what do I know. thanks for the info!

Still could be legit. VPN/tor for anonymity.

Torrent IPs show up as "tor", it's not that.

Can't rule out VPN.

Good post; I think they're at the end of the line...one to two months tops. This is just a last ditch effort to get whatever they can from new deposits without paying anyone else $$ imo

I don't understand this stuff about the Cyp banking crisis. When it first surfaced the ball was still in the air whether depositors would lose money or not. In the end all account holders with €100k+ got a 40-60% haircut on the amount over those €100k, but even at this time I don't think it's fully decided yet.

So, did Lock really have many accounts with €100k+ in them and how did ppl know that they would be losing money due to the crisis when the measures weren't even decided yet?

I'm pretty sure if you have money in Cyprus, you can't withdraw it, even though they haven't decided the final terms. When the crisis first hit, the banks closed down. I'm not sure if depositors have full access to their accounts today or not -- I would imagine not.

Lock probably has several million in player deposits, at least.

How much cash they ever had at one time, probably nowhere near that. If you only have 7% of player funds and lose access to it, things go bad quick. But even if they had more than that, it hurts just the same if you can't get to it.

It is likely many players will get stiffed, but I don't believe Lock started out as a scam like your bolded examples.

One thing OP mentioned that I haven't seen posted much about is the employees at Lock. Once the employees stop getting paid, it's all over.

Shane, is that you? If so, thank you for coming back and helping our community one last time.

I actually do have money in Cyprus, but as you say, there are limits on withdrawals (5k/month for a personal account). I didn't think this applied to company accounts.

Perhaps this Cyprus story is correct, I just think it surfaced a little to soon, before anyone really knew if they'd lose anything or not

Perhaps not the best approach to discuss/reveal a potential whistleblower's location if we want to get more info from him.

(he's probably under a vpn, though)

I mean, the timeline fits. And Cyprus was probably the best place in the world to hide illegal gambling proceeds from the US government.

But, plenty of other poker sites have gone broke without a Cyprus-type event occuring.