This is exactly the sentiments of all my posts in this thread. The fact that people felt justified in staking a claim at other peoples money is just absurd.

Serious greed itt. It's greed that causes many of the problems in this world. For anybody to suggest their lost FT money is worth more or is more important to them than anybody else's lost money is so LOL it doesn't even merit a response.

Let's all work together to get everybody their equal share. It's the right thing to do.



I think I have about forty three cents in my cashier. If anybody wants it be my guest.


fwiw I would like to see a priority cash out system. I'd like to see people with balances over $500 have first access to their funds with a cap set at $5000. My reasoning is that people with under $500 are less likely to have been reliant on that money to live and if you cap it at $5000 (yes $5000 is obv fairly arbitrary) there's a good chance everybody will get something. It's certainly not the perfect solution to a huge problem but at least it would put some money in the hands of a lot of people that are probably very needy at the moment.

You can't file the same suit in Europe for two important reasons:

1) No RICO in European law.

2) You'd almost certainly have to sue a different corporate entity, one under European jurisdiction.

What you would do would be to show a lawyer the case and background and ask them what sort of suit to bring against whom, based on local law.

In the situation where US players get >0% but <100% back of their frozen money and the ROW get 0%, while this is still extremely unfair, it is vastly different to the situation where US players get >100% back through the class action and the ROW get 0.

It's still mindboggling that a US court could stake claim to all remaining cash/assets, or the DOJ for that matter, if a large portion of this is from the ROW player funds.

I have to say I personally find the "US v. ROTW" dispute really depressing to read.

And the worst part is that for the most part it is legally meaningless.

As DoTheMath correctly posted, what really matters isn't what country has a lawsuit, what matters is which country (or countries) have actual control over the assets.

And even then courts in all relevant countries routinely accept for consideration all foreign claims.

It is a function of US anti-terrorism laws that the DOJ also has extra powers against assets held in a bank that also has assets or business in the US.

But ultimately any bank is going to do what the court sitting down the street tells it to do, no matter how loud the court across the ocean is telling it to do something different. And, despite the anti-terrorism laws, for the DOJ to get ownership of the assets will still take a judgment by the foreign court where the assets are held. And in most of those courts the DOJ will have no greater standing than any other creditor.

The same is true for the US class action lawsuit. Unique to the US lawsuit, however, are the RICO and other allegations of criminal conduct. This not only allows for 3X damages, it also provides the basis for going after the various shareholders/owners.

I have no knowledge whether any similar action is possible in another country, but at best it seems unlikely in any country that will have jurisdiction over assets given the clearly legal status of online poker in most of those countries. This would also likely lead to a rejection of the 3x damages in some foreign countries (though not the actual damages).

Hence the US lawsuit does have the additional promise for US players/class members of getting some amount of the assets that the alleged responsible owners have in the US (that would otherwise be unavailable to the ROTW anyway). But that is about the only possible difference. In all other relevant circumstances all poker players are most likely to be considered similar "unsecured creditors" of the site.

Also, again in most foreign courts, except with respect to the assets in the US which it already has its hands on, the DOJ is also an "unsecured creditor.

In short, if FTP does not get its miracle investor (or other miracle as yet unrumored) so that it can pay everyone, it will, one way or another, end up in Bankruptcy/receivorship and courts will begin divvying up its assets.

And the nationality of the creditors at that time will matter almost nothing in the legal dertermination of who gets how much of the remnant assets.

So can't we all just get along?

Skallagrim

Essentially you are asking that the regulator be aware of every change in law that might affect a licensee in every county in which a licesee operates, and then require the licensee to explain how they will comply with the new law, and then check to see if the company is performing as it described.

It would be nice to have a regulatory body that could do this, but I don't think we could afford the cost of that size of bureaucracy.

To answer my own "fair question" (which you avoided), I don't see any way we could reasonably expect the IOM GSC or any other reasonable regulatory body to have known that PS was allegedly engaging in bank fraud until April 15, 2011.

Agh, we answered your question. It is the job of these regulators to follow the laws of the major jurisdictions that these companies operate in otherwise they are not protecting player interests. To say that IOM or AGCC should not be aware of the laws of the single largest jurisdiction that PS was operating in, is absurd. To not question how they were processing payments when it was obvious that the laws forbid it and that other sites had paid fines for operating in these jurisdictions (the US) is absurd. We can debate this all night, but we will agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Statements like these bother me. Where in anything I have said is there a reason to think that may posts should be read as "the PPA defending FTP"?

First, when I am posting a PPA position I (and everyone else authorized to speak for the PPA) always clearly identify it as a PPA position.

Second, I am not defending FTP at all. I have purposely and consciously refrained from expressing an opinion regarding FTP precisely because posters like you will tend to attribute anything I say to the PPA or some ulterior motive associated with the PPA. To the extent that I have expressed an opinion at all it is that clearly FTP screwed up and players are suffering as a result, the open questions are how bad and in what exact manner.

What I have tried to do is simply post facts and reasonable conclusions from those facts (clearly labelled as such) that I hope further inform the debate and the readers of this forum. As a lawyer very familiar with this area of law I can provide relevant facts that many readers would otherwise miss. Many posters have told me they appreciate that. I do that on my own time because I (possibly foolishly) believe that a well informed poker community will be more effective when asserting its rights.

With respect to your posts specifically, please review what I have said. The only area in which I sought to counter your view was with respect to your critique of the effectiveness of the IOM GSC's regulations. There really is no dispute with respect to FTP other than whether "liquid" and "solvent" mean the same thing. That is not to say I agree with all your other accusations, merely that I expressed the self-labelled "guess" that if BF had not happened FTP would likely have continued on as normal (despite its other difficulties) - the #2 poker site in the world can afford to eat a lot of bad debt, especially if it is continuing to operate at a healthy profit margin and can compensate for the bad debt over time.


I thank you for that compliment. You may be happy to know that each of the issues you mention is important part of what the PPA is fighting for.

Skallagrim

Looks like the new owners want to shed creditors by forcing FTP into bankruptcy and settling for pennies on dollar. They may have cut side deal and will rebrand under Rush poker or take all their players and add them to FTP software. Send out emails to all of FTp previous customers offering them free 20$ after it's part of Caesars legal US online poker site.

I'm going to suggest that it was never common knowledge that gaming companies as a whole lied to US banks in order to process payments, whether before the passage of the UIGEA or after.

You seem to have moved straight from the indictment to the conviction, without bothering about the formality of a trial. Is this how you'd want a regulator to act?

Can you refresh my memory by citing a seizure in which a major US-facing poker site was implicated in wrongdoing related specifically to payment processing before BF?
Well obviously I am going to agree that there were obvious legal risks associated with US-facing online poker from the time of the passage of the UIGEA. For that reason, from several weeks before that date I have never had any money on a US-facing site.

However, I am allowed to make judgement calls about my own affairs based on caution and conservatism. I'm not so sure that we would want a regulatory agency that had to make judment calls about degrees of risks in unsettled legal matters. Regulatory bodies are to enforce settled regulation. "We think that the change in government in Denmark leads to an unacceptable risk to Danish poker player funds, so we are instantly withdrawing your licence unless you cease serving players there" is not the sort of thing many would want to see from a regulator.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect regulators to act with foresight that is as clear as your hindsight.

My apologies, but I was speaking generically and somewhat rhetorically, we didn't mean to imply you were expressing the opinions of the PPA.


Regulators, like site owners need to be held accountable. The issues facing PS and FTP are just as much a responsibility of inadequate regulation as they were of bad management. Adequate procedures, testing and review could have prevented some of these issues long before they reached the point they reached.

Clearly you were not looking at your statements when PartyPoker was processing flower shops charges back in 2004. If over 10 major sizers amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars over nearly a decade in the US and numerous payment processors indictments associated with gaming transactions as well publicized passage of the safe port act (and the acknowledgement of guilt by Party Poker and one of its founders - oh and this is the answer to your question above about a gaming company) isn't enough evidence for a regulator to know that something is amiss with the way a poker site is finding a way to accept money from US players to the tune of over $100M USD, then nothing in the world is going to convince you are as blind as the regulators who helped create this mess in the first place...this has been going on a long time, they should have been aware.

We will give you the last post on the rest of this debate as we are done replying to this issue. We have stated our argument as clearly as possible and its obvious that you have your opinion and we have our own. If you want to debate further, feel free to PM me rather than clog the thread with us rehashing the same issues over and over.

Just shut the **** up and stop being greedy. Even if it is only 1cent on the dollar, why would I just forfeit 250$? You can keep claiming you need it more but I know I need my money more than you.

On reflection, all it says it that he's applying to withdraw as counsel for 13 of the named defendants. He could well be counsel for some or all of the 11 others, including of course FTP. I can't find, online, a Statement of Defense or Reply to Claim (whatever it's called in NY) on behalf of FTP that indicates who their counsel is.

But either way, the story in this thread -- Ifrah withdraws as FTP's counsel -- is wrong. He either never was, or is withdrawing as counsel for the more minor defendants. If indeed he is counsel for FTP, there is an obvious conflict of interest that would prevent him from representing any of the poker players named in the lawsuit who weren't top level FTP executives.

Somebody asked about why no lawsuit in Europe: the most likely answer is that class-action lawsuits are a relatively new thing, created by statute, and would not exist in the same form over there as they do in the U.S. and Canada.

Forgive my stupidity folks, but as a former FTP player I have one question.

People talk about getting x% on the dollar from settlements or lawsuits or whatever, but how can you prove how much you have in the cashier which no longer functions? I have an idea how much I had, but by no means exact. Without FTP's own records of usernames and their associated real names, which I assume nobody besides FTP has at this moment, do we use the honour system?

I imagine that evidence gets 'lost' very easily, I have heard of a group of people called 'police' who have an ongoing tendency towards such losses. Basically, anybody got the numbers?

sorry because probably it has been discussed many times, but do you really think that the class action lawsuit has a strong legal basis? I have no idea about law, but clearly usa players were consciously taking part in an illegal activity, in an illegal company. From a non-expert standpoint, the class action seems stupid. Anyway, thanks american government for screwing the whole word and ruining my life. USA, land of the lobbyists. ****ty moronic country...

i took a screenshot of my PS and FTP cashier windows after black friday when i could no longer play

Something I've not see discussed/brought up through all of this:

Are we to be concerned that FTP the business has most of our personal information including Identification documents? What happens to this data? Where does it go? Who's hands will it be in? What can be done with the info/files? Can we protect ourselves in any way? etc...

Basically, what are the implications, if any.

I'm hesitant to type this because it sounds pretty funny in my head, but are screenshots admissible in a court of law?

What about people outside the US? They didn't get a partial castration like you US guys on Apr 15, they got to participate in a marathon to the edge of a steep cliff. If anybody outside the US was taking daily screenshots of the cashier after Apr 15, I say 'wow, mother of god you cover your bases'.

I dont remember ever giving them my ssn#. I doubt a copy of my drivers license and utility bill can be used in any form of identity theft.

Good point. I have a question too. I have never verified my account on ftp and would always just cash out on stars. If/when they ever payout will they let me still cashout my money or let me verify my account even though I dont want to send them my personal info after the way they handled this

How about a bank account number, routing number, ID docs, financial records, email addresses, passwords, the list goes on and on.

Are we really to have no concern at all? I'm not claiming one or the other, but I do know a rouge processor that was working with FTP wrongfully debited a whole lot of money from people in the past (see the PMI thread) and that was while they were in business so I think the question carries some validity and hopefully someone can give a more in depth opinion rather than just dismissing it because they don't have an SS number.

Not a legal expert, but I highly doubt a screenshot can be permissible in court.

If they fail, we would expect that winning American players will hear from the IRS. If they dont, its unclear if that will become part of a settlement. We dont know if it has begun, but as part of the settlement agreements on the domains, both PS and FTP agreed to a monitor to insure all documents were kept in tack.

They have your name and address which if you provided correct information will be enough for the IRS to track you down. Hopefully you reported that income on your tax return or were not a winner!

My accountant has a screen shot and a full audit from FTP along with my own records and copies of tax filings. We put it together just after BF. He's submitted it along with a claim. Have not heard any new info recently though.

Banking records might pose a threat if they fall in the wrong hands. I guess we'll just have to keep a close eye on our bank accounts associated with ftp and notify our bank immediately if any unauthorized transactions take place.