same here

Ahh....Lock is at it again.

Locking up funds with no explicit evidence.

You are now Guilty until proven innocent...and here is the catch:

You don't get a trial with a jury of your peers.

You don't get a trial in front of a judge.

You get an email address....that you hope someone is reading your outgoing emails...and that they are looking into the matter.

Then you have the court jester usually saying: "I'll chase this up with the security dept for you"....the jester isn't even saying that at this point.

Obviously all US players are working outside the legal system here....so recourses are limited....but couldn't ROW players that are playing completely legally in their home country take legal action?

Someone has to make this company accountable.
At the very least you should be able to speak with someone on the phone and explain your situation to them when there is $10K+ on the line here and many players who are having those amounts held.

Imagine you had 10K invested in a legit market. You log in one day to find out your funds are locked up and unavailable to you and your broker only gave you a contact email from which you only get an autoresponder reply with a list of policies?

People should be totally outraged and stop playing on Lock.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

You have evidence that they are paying ridiculously slowly compared to the average US facing site.
You have evidence that they are holding funds on a whim...and not backing it up with hard evidence.

Yes....I know the rakeback/promos are the best ones going....but if you have to sell your Lock funds for .50 on the $1 to turn it into cash...is it really worth it?

Yikes. This sounds really bad.

10k cancelled as well.

The conjecture found earlier in this thread is something I definitely thought of myself also at some point and makes complete sense.

Buys some time to process these same cashouts and in the cases that they are speaking of, find the ppl who are trying to operate this 'affiliate' 'money selling scam'.

Unfortunate how this was handled.

No warning, no nothing.
Given it takes a month at the very least to process a cash out, that means anyone whose cash out from say a month or two got cancelled is now subject to waiting at the very least another month.

Granted that some of the blame will be placed on these 'affiliate' and others trying to disrupt the market, however, given the pattern of passing the buck at Lock I wonder at what point a benefit of doubt is forfeited altogether.

The scariest part of this cancellation is the lack of responsiveness to emails and the blanketing of specific types of withdrawls, namely, ones that are for 10k.

As Shakespeare said.
Something has gone awry in Denmark.

One other point, which was mentioned elsewhere ITT, or in a lock thread elsewhere in this forum, is cataloging the improvements that were supposed to be made in a wide range of areas but have never really ever been addressed.
For whatever reason, surely all of those reasons for these changes never materializing can't simply be the product of all the people that Lock deals with, and none of the people at Lock. The new cashier (...for a few selective people...) The cashouts, The software?

Nothing has really changed at all.

Looks like if you accepted a transfer your odds of withdrawing has decreased to close to 0%. Looks like they just turned your chips into play chips.

Edit:

After reading the post about the account that didn't accept any transfers got denied as well, it seems if you have a large withdrawal your odds of cashing out are close to 0%.

Concerning, to say the least.. :/

Cross posting from Non U.S cashout thread just to point out the convenience of this recent cancellation of all skrill withdrawls, coupled with the suggestion that cash out back logs are no longer a big issue and that processing times will be faster shortly...
All seems contradictory and the timing is also interesting.

[QUOTE=LegitimizeMyFries;38219254]

10k also got cancelled. My situation is a bit different though. I hadn't received any transfers from my backer for quite a while, after which I won roughly $11k at the tables this month. Withdrew $10k and a few hours later my backer topped me up with $3k to keep me rolled for 5/10 and 10/20 shot-taking.

Cliffs

[x] win $11k
[x] cashout $10k
[x] receive $3k top-up from backer
[x] cashouts gets cancelled even though I was withdrawing my own winnings


I guess the only silver lining is my cashout had only been pending for 3 days

Shane, are you using the same BS excuse for all of these (as well as the heaven knows how many others who don't post here)?

Also: .... and now:

(8) Is there a blanket policy of cancelling all withrawals > $X?

Shane was reading this thread yesterday at 7:01PM my time(central), and was online for a while, then logged off, surprised he hasn't responded in this thread.

My $10k skrill cashout was initially cancelled. However, I received a follow up email from Lock Security stating that my account had been reviewed and the decision overturned. The second email came without any prompting from me and my $10k cashout is currently listed as "Authorized".

(1) Why did you imply that OP was manipulator/scammer when you later admitted you had no evidence of that? OP's account was flagged based on evidence uncovered by the security. Further discussions about the situation in general led to statements in this thread about the worst offenders. Some of this was then confused with OP's situation and I attempted to clear that up. So yes OP was flagged based on the investigation, no I was not told OP was a direct member of the core group of players that we have evidence of attempting to manipulate the system etc.
(2) Please link one example of the forum-based manipulation you refer to. This isnt a trial by 2+2 Im not going to post direct evidence on the open forum, Im sure we have a general gist of the type of negative activity.
(3) Why do you think one more person saying Lock is busto makes any difference when there are tonnes doing so already? If this was one voice sure I'd definitely agree with you. But this was a very well organised group that was very wide spread. The accounts used to cashout was large enough, but then above them was also layers of accounts buying the funds to funnel out to the cashout accounts.
(4) Why are affiliates given faster cashout times than the rest of your customers? Affiliates arent always given fast cashouts for their players, but they can use their influence (usually by bringing lots of players to the room) to then request in certain cases faster cashouts. Just as players can also request faster cashouts on occasions. For example a few weeks back I had player in a bad situation who needed a cashout as soon as possible so we rushed out a WU to them. The real advantage for affiliates is having more leverage than a normal player. This is also used to help players who have good relationships with their affiliates, so I often have affiliates contacting me on behalf of their players to chase their cashouts up.
(5) Do you agree with economics 101, supply-demand relationships? I agree with supply and demand, but these people were only adding demand at 50c on the dollar. So sure there were more people buying funds but they were buying at a price so low that it affected the market. Again its the scope of this situation thats the problem. If its one or two guys then its no big deal, but when its so many people buying on behalf of the same group then its a huge problem.
(6) If Lock has the money then why do you care if players make transfers? We have no problem with players transferring funds, but the worst of these accounts werent even logging into software to play they were just using Lock Poker as a trading platform for profit.
(7) Why do you accept withdrawals but then cancel them a month later (instead of rejecting them immediately if your made up "case by case" requirements aren't satified)? As Ive said before the cashouts were only cancelled when the investigation discovered this very large problem. The trigger for this investigation was somethings we found on our end unrelated to the initial cashout requests and we have also had some recent cashout requests cancelled. The timing of the cancellation is only related to the investigation.
(8) Is there a blanket policy of cancelling all withrawals > $X? Definitely not, we have had several batches of max cashouts go out recently and we have seen some cashouts for as little as $1000 cancelled. Obviously the bulk of the cancelled cashouts were for the max, but this is because the group was trying to funnel out large amounts of money.

I just want to be very clear with something else as well. This discussion always brings up 3 very different groups of 'players'.

Group 1 is the key offenders who weren't even playing.
Group 2 is legitimate players who were connected either knowingly or unknowingly with the first group.
Group 3 is legitimate players who are incorrectly connected to the first group.

If you are in Group 1 dont expect too much assistance from the security guys, groups 2 & 3 need to contact the security team and discuss this situation with them.

You clearly have no idea how markets work and really need to take econ 101...

hint: The only way people ever sell to them at 50c is if everyone else who was offering higher gets sold to. People only sell to the highest bidder so if they were able to set the market by buying it must be higher than the lowest market bid.

I don't think you understand what he's trying to say. There's accounts involved who are there pretty much there for the soul purpose of getting extra cashouts. This is negatively affecting YOUR cashout in the queue aswell and these people are effectively stealing from everyone selling funds.

It'd be like me telling all my friends "come play at Lock, make an account, buy funds at 0.5 en masse, turn over the money like once at say Coin Flips.. (lol)" and cash out. You've now effectively stolen money from everyone selling funds and are both skipping people in the queue of cashouts by having more cashouts available to you, aswell as making the cashout problems even bigger due to more people cashing out.

Thanks for the considered responses Shane. However, a few points arise:

On (1), I believe you did imply that OP was one of the scammers (see the quotes I posted). You may not have intended to but I suspect the appropriate course of action here is to accept that some of the words you used did imply that and offer an apology. (A players rep is at stake here).

I really don't think more people saying Lock is busto makes any difference at this stage. It is a widely held view in the poker community already.

A lot of withrawals have clearly been cancelled - there are 6 examples itt and likely a multiple of that who don't happen to post here. Is Security alleging that all of them are in the manipulator group? Also, if the issue is just with those people who trade funds but don't play (although personally I don't see the problem, that happens with other sites and provides a convenient source of rapid liquidity for players) then surely its easy to see who doesn't play.

Also, isn't the appropriate course of action here to send a warning to those people who trade but don't play along the lines of "From xxx date you will no longer be allowed to process transfers into your account."

Finally, it seems to me that whatever games you believe these scammers are playing wouldn't be possible/neccessary if Lock paid its players reasonably and didn't scare everyone with actions such as not paying ROW for 2 months, Unfair Play Non-technology, and mass-cancelling large withdrawal requests. Any time there is a big market dislocation (like $1 trading at $50c), economic actors will move in to try to arbitarge it.

If they have all the money on hand, more cashouts actually doesn't negatively affect other cashouts. But then again if pigs could fly...


I don't understand what you mean here. If there are people on 2p2 offering 70c how could you buy a single penny at 0.5 let alone "en masse"?

I mean the bottom line is if they had anywhere close to reasonable cashout times it wouldn't matter what they did for affiliates players would feel comfortable buying at 90c and just cashing that out. But even as it is if the market price is currently something, no ammount of bids to buy can lower that price.

For example if I go into the 2p2 xfer thread and offer to buy $100 million Lock funds at 0.05 how would I affect the market price of Lock $?

This, there is no way a bunch of people buying at 50c can make the price go down, as a matter of a fact I'm thinking about going to the transfer thread and offering to buy up any amount of lock money at .00001cents/dollar, any amount accepted, no matter how large. If I do this you are suggesting I have now caused the price of Lock money to go down?

Not this again... are you for real? It's like saying "if your condition is good, you can run 10000km in an hour just as well as 10 km" ofcourse MORE cashouts affect other cashouts just like producing MORE bottles of coke in a factory takes MORE TIME aswell and just how running all those km's take more time aswell. Did i really have to explain this, again..?

Maybe pigs can fly and cashouts get processed and everything else that needs to be done is the push of a button in your world, but sadily it doesn't work that way.


There's always going to be X cashouts processed in Y time. It doesn't matter who is getting them or whatever, but that's how it is. If an affiliate account or anyone else (such as me getting my cashout expedited after winning a promotion) gets their cashout faster, then guess what, this person has skipped the queue and has bumped everyone else's cashout behind one slight bit. If you buy that much, the price on 2+2 will go up, obviously. Good luck cashing out after that, though. Chances are you're going to want to sell it right back or be prepared to wait one helll of a long time

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. If people massively buy funds on Lock, the problem of cashing out gets moved to the buyer (who may unfairly have ways to surpass everyone else and is abusing that system and thus he doesn't care much about this "problem"). Do any of you want to promote this?

Again if most of the buyers are buying at 70c then sure someone trying to buy at 50c will get ignored. But if there is suddenly a large influx of buyers all willing to buy as much as possible but only willing to pay 50c then the market will drop.

Other buyers arent going buy at 70c if they can see large amounts being bought at 50c they are going to hold out for 50c.

So first you need to create panic to drive down the initial sales, then you need to purchase large amounts at that lower price to drive the entire market down then also controlling the market since you are buying in such bulk.

A great real world example of this is milk prices in Australia. A large supermarket chain started selling milk at below cost to draw in more customers, using the milk as a loss leader. They then leveraged this new higher volume against the dairy farmers driving down the price they were willing to pay for the milk. Thanks to the huge volumes of milk they buy farmers had to buckle and now the entire dairy industry is a mess. Other milk sellers had to lower their prices to compete with the chain that started it, and farmers are left with having no one to sell their milk to or selling at the lower price.


The initial investigation close to 40 accounts that were at the base of this operation used for the cashouts. Then above all of these were layers off accounts funnelling down to them to cashout. Then we have seen in the days since then more accounts connected to those accounts.

Its the scope of this operation thats the problem, it was widespread and extremely organised. This isnt just a couple of unconnected people who dont play but trade for profit, this is an organised group of people working together to manipulate the trading market for gross profit.


They affect cashouts by using their influence and status as affiliates to get cashouts pushed to the front of the queue. A lot of these cases looked at first to be individual requests, but when the bigger picture was put together it came to light that instead of the priority queue being used to help a series of individual players it was being used to aid a large group of connected accounts.

For example if I go into the 2p2 xfer thread and offer to buy $100 million Lock funds at 0.05 how would I affect the market price of Lock $?
By buying volume. There are people who want to move of large amounts, whereas most people want to buy smaller amounts. When the market is suddenly flooded with bulk buyers the value goes down. Sure I could sell off my 50K 2K at a time making several transactions hoping that no one along the way rips me off, or I could sell the whole lot right now to someone with a great trading history (since they were all buying so much).

I know it's not the same, but if there's a downward run on Lock funds, that would be really bad for business (worse than now lol). Also they have a limited pipeline for cashouts, which presumably eon't change. If say the owner came out and bought with his own money, that would say something. Of course there's no way to prove he's not using Lock's already limited resources and bumping others off the queue.

So obviously, having affiliates jump the queue was a bad idea if they bought funds in the market for 50 cents and made everyone else's wait times longer. Thus causing this downward spiral of longer wait times and lower prices for everyone else.

Also, i'm not saying this is what happened, but you can easily give the impression that the market is lower than it is. Say the actual bid is 60 cents. I post i'm willing to buy at 55. I get a buddy (or a second account) and say i did the 10k trade at 55. The bids at 60 may get filled at 60 or they may drop down, but the next people wanting to buy are going to look really hard at that large 55 trade before setting their price. I may even make multiple posts saying i want to sell large sums at 60, so all the buyers will flock to the 55. And people wanting to sell at 60 now may start going to the 55s. No one's going to make me trade on it, so why not? That's just two examples ... there are tons of ways to manipulate an illiquid market with little price transparency. This situation is worse because there are more natural sellers than buyers. Winning players want to cash out... They don't need to buy more funds they can't cash out of. It's not like fish are going to come to 2+2 to buy.

Your logic is flawed. First the real reason why this situation exists is because Lock does not have cash outs in a timely manner. First off people who are trading are actually improving cash out times. If they were not trading they would be withdrawing and you know the situation with withdrawing as it is.

Cliffs:
- Some peeps found a way to get Lock funds out by taking advantage of Lock's policy of letting affiliates cash out before their regular players
- The peeps realise they can profit by buying Lock funds in the market at 50% and withdrawng at 100%.
- Lock can't pay out those amounts and panics (can't have players actually taking large amounts of cash out!).
- Lock starts cancelling large withdrawals all over the place to try to stop it happening.
- Lock comes up with economically unsound red-herring cover story implying price manipulation.
- OP has the nerve to complain about his withdrawal being cancelled without good reason.
- Shane hints that OP is a scammer (although I haven't seen any evidence that anyone was scamming except Lock) and hasn't taken the opportunity to apologise.

I think the OP will get their money. Not because they made this thread but because they had nothing to do with it.

Shane, assuming everything you say is correct, canceling withdrawals en masse and then making players protest their innocence (when a very avoidable number of withdrawals have been canceled) is still a terrible business practice.

So right now the best case explanation for this is that lock did something terrible, but it was a product of over-zealousness/stupidity rather than anything criminal. Worst case is much worse than that.

No matter what, #notagoodlook