I'm pretty sure they have a policy of never replying to players that contact them directly.

I have reason to believe that Microgaming is much more at fault than simply a lack of due diligence or not providing goodwill to reimburse player's account balances. They held the player's balances not Tusk. They refuse to talk to anyone, lawyers, investigators, liquidators. When asked why there is a shortfall of 4-5 million in one of the accounts they held they do not respond or play dumb.

Simply put, Microgaming are crooks.

I sent them an email from a different address that had nothing to do with the microgaming scandal at all to see if they would respond, then i would have insta-replied grilling them. Unfortunately they didn't even respond to the irrelevant email.

thats what happens when theres no regulation don t play on shady sites

Interesting reading and many a good and bad insight to the situation.

No doubt, what happened to player funds is horrendous and whether you lost hundreds or thousands, it still bites.

Fact one: Microgaming, by law, is 100% NOT liable, for the actions (external banking/marketing/bonus offers, operator tournament set up etc) of it's licencees. I think you have to come to terms with that. IF they were to reimburse players it would be through goodwill BUT then what message does that send to potential future partners. "ahhh.. does not matter what the hell we do.. MG will bail out us out"... Dream on.. This is business we are talking about not charity..!

Since when have any of you, as poker players, been soft on an opponent so you don't hurt their bankroll? Or offer them their money back when you give them a bad beat.? You try to crush everyone of your opponents.. That's the business of playing poker.. Now come to terms with how business works..

You do not bail out a company that due to it's own mismanagement and naiivity totally screws up. Do you think TUSK would have been happy with Microgaming coming in at the start of their deal saying, "We want him as CEO, fire that other guy coz his marketing emails suck etc etc". I don't think TUSK would have been too happy and would simply have told MG to get stuffed and leave them to run things how they want to...

The other point to make is, not one single person has pointed out WHY TUSK actually went bust..!!

Basically they ran out of money.. Ask yourselves why..!

They (TUSK skins) were constantly undercutting each other in order to stay "competitive" due the demands of the "market"..... because.... players got greedier and greedier demanding higher rake back & bonuses etc (showing little to no loyalty at all by moving to whichever skin offered the most, massive player poaching etc) which eventually meant that TUSK and it's rakeback mongering skins could no longer make a profit..

Should Microgaming be liable for that?

Yes we all want to make money etc but realise that poker room/skin mis-management driven by a collective greed and lack of loyalty from it's "customers" were the main reasons for the demise of TUSK.

Which is why Microgaming now have super strict rakeback polices to stop this from happening again..

Is a great shame lots of people have lost money but do not for one second think this pleases Microgaming. No one there is getting a bonus for what happened at TUSK. From a legal perspective their hands are tied... I know they were keen to sort out the player financial situation.... but.... then the lawyers stepped in..........

So your first reason that they should cover the players is that it's 'the right thing to do'. That is laughable, you do realise it is a company you are dealing with not a charity? Companies generally dont do stuff because its "the right thing to do", they do whatever they feel is most profitable.

Your second reason is also bull**** - "Microgaming have resposibility for having directed the skins to Tusk in the first place." Yes they directed the skins to tusk but that is irrelevant as all that matter is if they are legally responsible/liable and they are not. You seriously expect a business, an especially an offshore internet gambling business to make a decision for $5 million based on their moral responsibliity?

At the end of the day, Microgaming sat down and looked at the figures and they have obviously decided that it is more profitable for them not to pay the players than it is to pay them and that is the way business works. Sucks for the players alright and I see zero chance of them getting any money back as if Microgaming were gonna pay up they would've done it long ago and saved themselves the negative publicity.

The morality may be irreleavnt, but not from a business perspective. It's the right thing to do because it engenders customer confidence. This is worth millions. That's why they've bailed out failed operators in the past. Did you miss this?

Thanks for your kind words. In fact, neither is [profanity bypassing filter ugh]. As far as the latter goes, I'm not at all sure you can dismiss such gross irresponsibility so conveniently. Lack of any due diligence for Tusk may not be a problem insofar as Microgaming's own losses go, but when their irresponsibility has resulted in such disadvantaging of others, I cannot say that there may not be legal consequences. Of course, evidence from the skins would be needed, but this may yet be an angle.

This is what they would have you believe, but it is not true. It is in my honest opinion there is a good chance of them being shown responsible for this fiasco and having attempted to defraud the players. This is why players are especially not safe on their network, since when this happens then all $%#@ hits the fan and the players balances on any Microgaming site are not safe. While it is true that Ladbrokes and Unibet will most likely cover balances it is not guaranteed.

It absolutly would, but the whole point is that I have seen no evidence to prove (or even make it likely) that MG has commited any great atrocity. When I ask for such evidence, I'm told I need to read more and/or more closely but I've yet to find anything but "they should because it's the right thing to do" or "they must be more deeply involved than what can be proven so they should".

As far as I can tell, the worst you can accuse MG of is being a cynical business. And I'm not even sure it can be taken that far based on what's been presented in this thread (although I've no doubt that is true).

I feel for those who lost money in this situation. It sucks and they have every right to be angry. But the fact that those actually responsible are no longer around to be held responsible, does not mean that you can just latch onto the nearest company and claim they should be held responsible instead.

A simple email saying were pulling the ecorga seal on them sites would of being nice they done that atleast a week before this happened oh and btw microgaming co invented ecorga.

Edit: And they do know about our accounts because when you sign up at a microgaming site when you were a member of another it says on the sign up are you xxx so there not clueless and have something to do with the accounts.

And this comes from the Unibet representative - lol

What? The players get bailed out, not the business.

Do you have any proof for this at all? Because to my mind this can't account for the ridiculous losses made by tusk, as can in no way count for sustained loss over a period of more that a year. Also, if tusk gave a set rake % to the skins then what the skins pay the player wouldn't have affected tusk.

Microgaming imposed a rakeback cap on the 28th of November 2006. Are you implying that they knew tusk were going down the tubes at this stage?

Oh right, there's a law that prohibits microgaming from paying out in this situation. How cunning of lawmakers to see this situation coming and act to stop it before it was too late.

In his own words:

Wow that unibet guy listed several things that were false. I read it at lunch today while at work and just thought he was clueless. Now I see he was outright lying...

Unibet was one of the online casinos that was upset with tusk because they were stealing players through rakeback.

Did you miss where I said this -"At the end of the day, Microgaming sat down and looked at the figures and they have obviously decided that it is more profitable for them not to pay the players than it is to pay them and that is the way business works."

If they thought it would be more profitable in the long run to pay the players they would have done it by now. They obviously don't think avoiding the negative publicity over this issue is worth the $5 million it would cost to fix it. You yourself might think it'd be more profitable for them based on quick calculations done off the top of your head, but they are the ones who've likely put in several hundred man hours weighing it up and their complete silence on the issue speaks volumes.

I have made previous posts before directly related to feedback for Unibet, so is obvious I am from Unibet.. I am not an apologist for Microgaming, just pointing out why this whole mess arose.

Like the recent crash in the financial markets, this all happened because everyone got blinded by greed. And they paid for it unfortunately along with a lot of innocents.

Who is responsible for paying who, is up to the legals. Lets hope players do come away from this happy.

I was also just being pragmatic in saying that Microgaming, whether I, you or the rest of the world like it or not, is not responsible for (predicting) the types of actions/behaviours of it's operators/players that caused the TUSK mess.

Happy Easter & if you play some poker, hope you all kick ass at the tables..!

No its a huge issue and the fact that you don;t see why is concerning to me. You have what 20 posts? Unless someone takes the time to look through your posting history no way anyone would ever know this. Most psters like myself looked over what you wrote and assumed you were just an average low volume poster.

I'd also like you to address my points. (Maybe you havn;t had enough time though since you just posted). I don;t want to spread misinformation myself but it looks like most of what you said was a dileberate attempt to mislead. We both know MGS had several reasons to get rid of TUSK. The two most primary being cutting off competition through rakeback rates (I understand unibets anger over that) and also because the deposits from Tusk players were much smaller than withdrawls (many tusk players were regulars who rarely redeposited, I have been sent numbers on the actual ratios).

The latter issue is VERY interesting. Because if tusk was really owed money by MGS it would explain why (I don;t neccesarily buy it but it does partially explain how they could have lost money). All this time I've belived MGS was owed money by them but when you look at the money flow seems like its wuite possible it could be the reverse. This part here is clearly speculation though, but it is common knowledge tusk took money from the network rather than contributed.[/B]

Also your attitude about microgaming being cutthroat and essentially scrwing players over because they can is concerning considering you work for one of their casino's.

were you lying when you said you had 600k tied up?

Can the Unibet rep please clarify something here. Are the player funds for players at Unibet held in trust in segregated accounts for the players or not?

It's liquidation 101 that funds held in trust for players take priority over all the other claims in a liquidation and that if the funds aren't the players are at the back of a very long clue if something goes wrong.

Ladbrokes (another MG licencee) state that they hold player funds in trust in segregated accounts. So it would certainly seem to be possible on the MG network to do that.

It would also seem that MG didn't make it a term of their licence to Tusk as Tusk didn't hold the funds that way (so MG's claims to be the 'safest' online gaming company as regards player protection are shown to be laughable when their chosen main licencee/fund handler runs off with $6m of player funds).

Because the one lesson we have all had reinforced thru this debacle is that offshore gaming sites and those involved in them are not to be trusted and that you take a risk whenever you put your funds in them - so to minimise that risk you put your money in reputable companies who actually take player protection seriously and segregate player funds rather than dipping into them for general running costs and the CFO's Ferrari. Do Unibet actually protect funds in this way? If not then even if you are mad enough to play an MG site, it shouldn't be Unibet.

I had like 4 or 5k$ on one Microgaming skin (Battlefield), which seems lost in all of this ...

I sent 1 e-mail a while back, but that was it. I don't really care about it. Or better said, I'm a lazy ass bastard with complete disregard for monies ... (not having RB on most sites I play on is further proof of that )

I'm quite lucky I didn't have a lot more on it, though. I remember that just before all this started, I was thinking about starting to play seriously on that network. I guess I have to thank my laziness for that, YAY!

P.s.: Lesson: only trust "reputable" sites, either big respectable poker rooms (like PS, FT), then rooms that are owned by publicly traded companies, or rooms that are owned by big reputable sports-bookies.
That's pretty much it, you should always be at least a bit sceptical about rooms that don't fall in any of these 3 groups. Sadly, those other rooms usually offer biggest bonuses & RB, for obvious reasons ...

Well, I couldn't have put it more elegantly myself.

You haven't addressed any of the points made against your post. You say you're not an apologist for microgaming but given that you clearly hadn't thought through any of this enough to defend your words, the only reason you could have for posting was jumping to defence of microgaming and your own business interest.

Unfortunately I would have expected to hear by now if the MGS licence mentioned something about a legal condition of holding the funds in trust. In any case it's pretty clear that Tusk has spent all our money on operating expenses.

There's also some question of the meaning of "in trust" under various legislation. It may not be enough to dump all the funds into a single account and say that it's in trust (this is just what I've read on these forums, I have no legal knowledge). This would mean that if the company goes under there's no legal requirement on the part of the liquidator or banks to return the funds to the players.

bigt2k4 is saying that MGS held the player funds. I believe him to be saying this in good faith, but unfortunately, as he hasn't backed this up with any explanation or evidence, I have to assume that he's been misled. All the other evidence fits Tusk having the account, and he hasn't explained how the evidence at hand can be combined with MGS holding the funds.

Can you explain the "right to offset" bit a little more? If the bank has the ability to jump the queue in a liquidation due to this, then surely the segregation of the funds is questionable, and the company is essentially securing its debt with the segregated account. They could have had the segregated account at a different bank, and the only reason not to do this would be because it was always your plan to secure the debt in this manner?