Friend of mine who wrote a bad echeck to Poker Stars got a call from a lawyer threatening to take action if he didn't pay. I'm not sure how a company in another country can take legal action against someone in the US, and of course nothing has happened to my friend to date. Obv Poker Stars is completely different from FT, I'm just bringing this up as an example of something actually happening, albeit just a threat, to someone who writes a bad echeck to an OLP company.

Full Tilt "needs to" swollow the phantom deposits but will they? Will the former FT execs, the DOJ, or the GBT swollow 120 mil of missing money AND repay full player account balances? I highly doubt it.

It could be argued that players who got away with phantom deposits "need to" make good on them. what turned out to be freerolling may now be affecting the chances of players getting all of their rolls back.

I don't think I would ever conclude that FT was giving me a gift. And if I ever started to think they were giving me a gift I would email them and say "are you giving me a gift?" and they would say "no, we just are having delays with our processor." You make some good points but I can't go along with the gift analogy. But since you say "over a year" I assume you mean after BF. How could you conclude, after BF, that it was a gift? The general reason people weren't getting charged for deposits became clear on BF. Their system of processing transactions was shut down. I guess someone could then conclude that they were never going to be charged, but if I were in their shoes I would have still been a little wary of totally writing it off, in case the debts to the dissolving company were to be somehow bought out in the future, which may be what is happening currently.

AND if FTP did something like that (which to my knowledge they have not) then it would be more reasonable to expect the players that made phantom deposits in good faith to still keep the cash on hand to cover the deposit, but given I haven't heard of FTP making such claims, they effectively forfeited (forgave teh debt) the right to that money much as they forfeited numerous funds from payment processors to the DoJ well before BF. So going after these people now while leaving alone the real beneficieries of the fraud (even if they were also innocent parties), just doesn't seem morally correct to me. It was a buisness decission not to lay calim to those funds, and the same people also decided that reather than accepting the consequances of that decission, they were going to steal an ammount from someone else to cover those shortfalls and line their pockets nontheless. SO you know why you're not going to get your funds, and you also know where those funds are, but you should not confuse the two.

Just as a though experiment... suppose I owe someone $5 (FTP) and they owe someone else $5 (shareholders). Now they chose not to collect the debt from me (and I forget cause they never even mention it in over a year) but instead they steal your $$ and give it to whomever they owed money to. Now if the thief no longer has any $$ left shold you come get your money from me or the person they gave your stolen cash to? You can make arguments for both, but I would add that I was certainly not the beneficiary of their crime, and furthermore, the direct beneficiary that recived your money also stipulated as part of repayment of the debt that it must be aquired legaly (properly paid dividends). So demanding that I come up with the $5 while not asking the direct (though innocent) beneficary of the theft to give back the procedes of the crime seems rather

If I was told I could make a deposit on a poker site and most likely get a deposit bonus and/or rakeback for doing so and not have that deposit taken out of my account for a year - and even be allowed to withdraw all my winnings (or even the deposit!) I would snap call and triple fist pump, and not complain in the least when someone came to collect the money (especially since it will be collected on behalf of the other players rather than the company).

I don't think I really disagree with any of this as being the ideal behavior, but all things considered I think we're expecting far too much of these people ESP when compared to what we're expecting of the owners of the company in terms of fixing the problems. Also, I'd point out that afaik these processor problems started occruing in ealy 2010 (if not before) and as such there was a year before FTP officially ran into major problems for them to try to collect. Maybe this is a moral failure on my part, but if I owe a company money I'd expect them to at least sent me a notice rather than them realying on me to beg them to take what I thought I owed. And maybe I just have too much $$ or too many transactions, but its quite possible I wouldn't notice whether I have a couple of hundered dollars extra in my bank acount at the end of they year, let alone sort out what exactly the reason for that (maybe I forgot someone owed me $$ and they just paid me) is.

I have several probelms with this. The bolded part is something I wasn;t even thinking about but it especially indicates that I have no debts toward said company. Any normal company would withdraw processing fees at least so that shoudl definatly included the initial loss on processing the deposit. If they did not keep track of that or for whatever reason decided not to do that, then shouldn't I conclude that I have not debts, or is that ?

At this point it is quite reasonable that I have spent that money and any other withdrawals and can no longer make any funds available. So if later pointed out that this is what indeed happened I should try to repay my debts, but certainly NOT BEFORE those people that actually stole the money from your account in order to cover what they never colected from me make an attemt to give you back your stolen money. The fact that they will likely be able to use corporate laws to get around those responsabilities and have you come directly after me, doesn't mean that's the right thing that should be happening without any attempt at clawback.

Yes I think that both kinds of beneficiaries should be asked to give money back. I think the direct beneficiaries have already been forced to give a lot back when their assets were seized by the government. The direct beneficiaries you describe would be the FT execs, correct? not the lower shareholders who unwittingly received proceeds of the crime? Regardless, the individual who owed FT $5 benefited by not ever having to pay that $5. I'm not sure the greater crimes perpetrated by the thief absolve that individual of the $5 debt. But to be honest I'm not entirely sure it doesn't either. I edited the last paragraph of my post you quoted because I think I sounded like I am more steadfast in my argument than I really am. I am having trouble making up my mind about this very complicated and sensitive situation, but I feel there is a good argument to be made that the phantom depositers still owe the money.

no charges filed? hard to take you serious. what charges exactly?

Except for cases where the DOJ thinks he has evidence for wire fraud against some of those who made multiple transactions with the intent to scam, this is just a question of asset collection and FTP's lawyers made it clear they would stipulate that any money the DOJ can get for the sale or recovery of company assets will go towards player repayment.

While the DOJ can't legally negotiate a sentence reduction as part of a forfeiture settlement, the fact that the players were repaid through company assets would go a long way for the BOD when/if it goes to sentencing.

The DOJ won't even be involved in debt collection, they are creating a fund for which they will hire a trustee to manage, and his only job will be to collect money for this fund until there are no more pots of gold to find or there is enough money to make the victims whole.

For those who closed their bank accounts and continued to make deposits from those accounts, then bragged to 'friends' about what they were doing, prosecuting a few of them for wire fraud might go a long way to speed up the recovery process.

I get that, just hope the money goes where it belongs if it is collected Thanks

Brand new thread for you boys and girls to talk about the phantom deposit stuff. I did my best to move the correct posts here, and I copied a couple of the posts that I felt clearly belonged in both threads.

For anyone who's interested, I wrote up a long summary of the phantom deposit situation in the OP.

I don't see a reason why it would go anywhere else, forfeiture has the connotation of being a money grab by the government but this is really just a liquidation and the government is using forfeiture to give the victims priority above other creditors.

The DOJ will not be selling the individual companies that owe money to or are owed money from US players to Tapie (Orinic and Filco or whatever), instead they will appoint a trustee to liquidate these companies.

The trustee will notify everyone of their balance and give them the opportunity to dispute it. If you have a negative balance and were to ignore their notification and they took you to court to seek a judgement, it wouldn't be USDOJ v Bene Gesserit, it would be like in the Madoff case:
v Bene Gesserit

Substituting BLMIS with Tiltware or Orinic or Filco or whichever, with the proceeds going to victims and if there is anything left when they finish raping the BOD then any other creditors could get paid.

I guess we're more in agrement that I initialy thought so I'll just try to clarify some things. First off could you point me to a link regarding the last paragraph. I waguely remeber the complaint being amended, but I don't recal anything about any new fraud or theft charges being added directly related to the shortfal in player funds, so i'd like to see what exactly were the new charges myself.

Now regarading the leagal ability to collect debt there are a couple of issues. First off, I belive a noraml check is typically considered void in uncashed for 6 month, so I would certainly think that would apply to an e-checks more than a year old. I'm not sure what recourse someone attemting to cash it later on has. I know banks sometimes decide to cash them later or simply make a mistake and don't look at the date, but I also belive you can dispute the charges at that point.

The other interesting point in this particular case is that you technically promised money to an illegal operation acording to the very same DoJ that would now attempt to collect debts on behalf of that organisation... seems a bit wierd to me though not sure that is a legal issue. But just imagine you bought a killo of cocaine from a long time dealer and told him this time the check's in the mail. He gets busted in the mean time and you cance the cehck so when the gov seizes his 'asstes' are they going to come after you for the debt?!? And again, in this particular case it's technically leagal for you to posses (but not pay for) cocaine, but not legal for anyone to sell it.

Finally for the bolded part regarding the moral claims. Although law and ethics shuld try to coencide they unfortuantely often do not and I belive this is one of those case. I actually think in general it is quite possible to have a moral obligation long after your legal one expires, or to not have any moral obligation even if you may be legaly liable.

Particularly, I actually belive that morally phantom depositors should still pay back deposits even if they have no leagal liability, BUT only if all dividends payments have been clawded back and there is still a shorfall to cover player balances. Otherwise if no dividends are clawed back (as seems likely) then they have no moral obligations to pay the deposits even though they may be legaly forced to. I guess you can accuse me of being a relativist because I don't belive there is one correct moral position of what is wright or wrong without placing it the context of what is being asked of and done by others.

My precise reasoning in this case is that both phantom depositors and shareholders profited from the fraud and theft perpetrated by FTP. In a case wehre there was no such impropriatey (PS) the phantom deposits were written of as loses and the shareholders compensated accordingly afterwards based on actual company profits. Every company (even a bank) has to at some point write off uncolectable debts and share prices react accordingly. Simply not making an attempt to collect in the first place (probably because of teh near cirtitude of failure here) does not allow you to opperate as if you have those funds and preted they are contributing to company profits and reward shareholders accordingly.

In order to reward the shareholders here FTP stole from the only actual victims which are the real depositors who were falsely promised the posibility of reciving payments from deposits that were never colected, and on top of that had their own deposits stolen to pay the sharholders the share of the profits that would have come from the uncolected deposits! If this last theft had not occured and only dividends from actual profits were paid out after accounting for the operational loses (phantom deposits), then by all acounts there would have been enough cash to cover the outstanding balances of all players (phnatom and real depositors alike)!

So while leagaly a very specific set of circumstance must be invoked for clawback, which I do think could actually be aplied here, it does seem to me that at least from a moral perspective we should not be going after a bunch of 'small time crooks' that may only benefit now due to the illegal activiy of FTP individually profit from not paying a few hundred in debts. Collectively the total phantom deposits are about a quarter of the dividends paid in the last couple of years, and the people initially had every intention of meeting their obligations which again, they were not able to do through no fault of their own but rather because of FTP's issues.

At the same time a handful of individuals remain in possesion of stolen funds to the tune of tens of milions (hundreds of millions colectively), that while they may have legitimately thought were owed to them, in reality the company was not generating anywhere near the revenue to justify the payments and as such had to resort to theft from the real deposits that should have been kept seperate from company assets in the first place.

In conclusion I think that the more major and direct beneficiaries of the theft shoud be moraly required to give back the funds (even if recived in good faith and leagly they are not) they recived before we require that the indirect beneficiareis, that also never intended to benefit beyond what was just and only got much smaller gifts as a result, be required to restore the funds to make victims whole.

plain and simple anybody that paid by e-cheque owes the money! Yes they should go after them.
If I (and i did this) send a notice for monthly withdrawls from my bank account to the city I live in for my taxes (over $3500 a year) and they forget to take out the money (they missed it for over 1 year). Can i now say you should have taken the money when i told you so now I don't owe you my property taxes for last year?
no chance in HELL!!
an e-cheque is a promise to pay.