Explanation of How the Full Tilt Board Stole Player Money

[Bene Gesserit]

Originally Posted by depalma13

Umm... it's a civil complaint. The DOJ only needs a preponderance of evidence to get a conviction.

Yes kinda like the OJ Simpson criminal vs civil trials........ mostly same evidence, different rules, totally different outcome!

[depalma13]

Originally Posted by Bene Gesserit

Yes kinda like the OJ Simpson criminal vs civil trials........ mostly same evidence, different rules, totally different outcome!

Exactly.

[t_roy]

Originally Posted by depalma13

Umm... it's a civil complaint. The DOJ only needs a preponderance of evidence to get a conviction.

True. I think the argument is whether or not there will also be a criminal trial though. IMO there is more than enough evidence to get criminal convictions.

[t_roy]

Originally Posted by sngplayer

If deposits were actually income, then the owners could pay themselves as much as they wanted legally. This would have to be laid out in the player agreement, which guess what??? I didn't read every word of.

No they could not have done that legally. How could something like that possibly be legal in any semi developed country?

When a company owes creditors (players are creditors in this case) money, the owners can't just siphon off all the money and screw the creditors. I'm no lawyer, but I know a decent amount about business and there is just no possible way that this is legal. The owners may be able to argue that the their salaries were not outrageous and were perfectly legal, but there is absolutely no way that paying out massive dividends was legal while the company was in such dire straights. If it were, by some freak law, legal then the DOJ would not have added this to the civil case.

Am I not making sense here? Help me out cause I would like to fully explain this clearly and concisely and add it to the OP.

[PokerIsFrustrating]

Originally Posted by sngplayer

If deposits were actually income, then the owners could pay themselves as much as they wanted legally. This would have to be laid out in the player agreement, which guess what??? I didn't read every word of.

Maybe in Alderny, but not in the US. Imagine I own some kind of travel agency. I decide I'm going to screw over my clients. I make everyone pay a month ahead, then I funnel all of the money out of the company and declare bankruptcy.

That's illegal, and you'd better believe I'm getting civil lawsuits and potentially criminal charges depending on what kind of fraudulent practices were going on.

[PokerIsFrustrating]

Originally Posted by t_roy

No they could not have done that legally. How could something like that possibly be legal in any semi developed country?

When a company owes creditors (players are creditors in this case) money, the owners can't just siphon off all the money and screw the creditors. I'm no lawyer, but I know a decent amount about business and there is just no possible way that this is legal. The owners may be able to argue that the their salaries were not outrageous and were perfectly legal, but there is absolutely no way that paying out massive dividends was legal while the company was in such dire straights. If it were, by some freak law, legal then the DOJ would not have added this to the civil case.

Am I not making sense here? Help me out cause I would like to fully explain this clearly and concisely and add it to the OP.

You're right, don't sweat it dude. For the people who say "well player deposits are income, I will refer you back to FULL TILT POKER'S OWN COMMUNICATION, one of which said:

One of those emails read, in part: "To protect both our players and business from financial problems, all player account funds are segregated and held separately from our operating accounts. Unlike some companies in our industry, we completely understand and accept that your account money belongs to you, not Full Tilt Poker."

It's in the DOJ filings. So FTP was lying about this, intentionally misleading players, and stealing what should have been segregated player funds.

[t_roy]

Just posted about this in the other thread. Thought this might help clear some stuff up. Any chance I get this added to the OP?





Why FTP Isn’t Just Like a Bank

“Banks only have to keep a portion of their deposits as cash. Wasn’t Full Tilt just operating the same way? They just happened to experience a run on the bank due to Black Friday.”


Yes, banks are only required to keep a small percentage of deposits as liquid cash. Full Tilt probably actually kept more than enough liquid cash to pay out players if Black Friday did not happen. That is not where Full Tilt did wrong. They went wrong with what they did with the rest of their money that was not liquid cash.

Banks use the money to invest in various things like mortgages and bonds. Banks always have enough assets to cover all of there deposits. They actually have more than enough. They don’t have it liquid, but if they are given enough time to unwind and sell there investments and everything else they owned, they would be able to pay back every depositor (and creditor) and still have money left over. The amount of money they would have left over is known as book value. If you want proof then look up the book value of some banks. They will all be positive. A bank isn’t going to be allowed to operate with a negative book value. It would be absolutely illegal for a bank to pay dividends if it were even approaching a negative book value. Companies only pay dividends if they have more than enough money to cover their obligations.

Instead of using player deposits to buy investments, Full Tilt used player deposits to pay the owners huge dividends. This left it with much fewer assets than it owed in player deposits (it had a negative book value.) Even then Full Tilt continued to pay dividends. So even if Full Tilt sold everything, it would not have anywhere near enough money to pay back players. This statement proves that the company was in very dire straights prior to Black Friday.

From memo summarizing the amendment,
"The Amended Complaint further alleges that, as of March 31, 2011, Full Tilt Poker owed approximately $390 million to players around the world, including approximately $150 million owed to players in the United States. At that time Full Tilt Poker had only approximately $60 million on deposit in its bank accounts."

Full Tilt was definitely not just like a bank. What they did was intentionally steal our money. There will probably be people going to jail for quite a while.

[callipygian]

Originally Posted by PokerIsFrustrating

I'm honestly not trolling or trying to be deliberately annoying.

Really want to know - if the DOJ stuff is true.

Your guess is as good as mine. I'm not saying the DOJ is right, or it's wrong. I'm saying that I'm not going to take a press release from a horribly biased source as gospel truth.

Originally Posted by PokerIsFrustrating

If they paid their board members hundreds of millions, while shorting player funds, losing millions to payment processing etc, do you acknowledge there's a major problem?

I think there's a major problem with Full Tilt whether or not they paid their board members hundreds of millions or not.

Originally Posted by PokerIsFrustrating

If Lederer and Ferguson KNEW the company was borderline insolvent and took money anyway, what do you consider that?

Being a dick.

Originally Posted by PokerIsFrustrating

Finally, if this was such a horrible situation and DOJ freezing funds makes repayment impossible, how did Stars manage to pay US players back in a few weeks with no problems?

I explained this above, but here it is again. Both PS and FT kept accounts which were "segregated" according to the definition of their respective jurisdictions, but the definitions were different. Isle of Man's definition meant what the general public thinks of as "segregated" - a separate account with no operational funds comingled with player funds. Alderney's definition meant that there just had to be a way to track which portion of the funds were player funds, and used the term "protected" to indicate that the accounts were separated.

Using Alderney's definitions, it's almost certain that Pokerstars' funds were segregated and protected, while Full Tilt's funds were segregated and unprotected. Using Isle of Man's definitions, Pokerstars' funds were segregated, while Full Tilt's funds were unsegregated.

When Full Tilt says its funds were "segregated," they are not lying (intentionally saying something false) - by the definition of their license, their funds WERE segregated. Obviously, Full Tilt is playing with semantics here (just like when Bill Clinton claimed he did not have "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky), but the point is that they're not evil people who were out to steal your money from Day 1.

Originally Posted by Do it Right

if you're implying that the DoJ is blatantly lying on factual issues for whatever reason ... then you should slowly remove the tin foil hat and just stop posting.

I don't think the DOJ is blatantly lying. I think they are wording their press releases to make them look as good as possible. Just like I think Full Tilt is wording their press releases to make them look as good as possible.

Take, for instance, the notion of "bank accounts." I have no doubt that on March 31st, Full Tilt did factually have $60 million in their bank accounts. But is that all the money Full Tilt had? We know that a lot of the money was held in trust in third party payment processors. Did the DOJ count that money as part of Full Tilt's assets? I suspect not. We also know that Full Tilt lent a bunch of money to FT Pros. Are those loans legally enforceable? If so, that's also money not in the bank but should count as assets.

I think the DOJ is being straight up when it says that Full Tilt had $60 million IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT(S). I don't think that's the whole story, though.

Originally Posted by DoItRight

presumably because you think they don't 'like' Full Tilt?

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't think the DOJ dislikes Full Tilt ... or Pokerstars for that matter. I don't think it's a big secret that the DOJ is out for blood.

But the bigger question of bias should be answered. Yes, I played on Full Tilt, and I have money stuck on Full Tilt. 99.7% of my money was on Pokerstars, and I got it back, so I have very little monetary concern. I don't work for the DOJ nor know anyone who does, I think cops planting evidence is real but rare, and I have nothing against the government in general.

I'm criticizing people because there's a huge bandwagon effect where poker players will seemingly do anything to avoid taking some responsibility for their own actions. "DOJ is lying and stealing my money!" has now become "FT is lying and stealing my money!" Truth is that nobody's stealing our money; FT, as it turns out, was a very poorly run company and that's it. It's like if Fidelity or Schwab (places you'd keep money that FDIC doesn't cover) went under - sucks, but we knowingly took that risk (or should have) going in.

Keep in mind that it's very likely Pokerstars was equally mismanaged but escaped by virtue of Isle of Man having stricter restrictions.

[t_roy]

lol and I'm the myopic one. Do you have any knowledge of business law whatsoever or are you just pulling the "it's not illegal" part out of your own brain?

[TheDarkElf]

Originally Posted by callipygian

I'm criticizing people because there's a huge bandwagon effect where poker players will seemingly do anything to avoid taking some responsibility for their own actions. "DOJ is lying and stealing my money!" has now become "FT is lying and stealing my money!" Truth is that nobody's stealing our money; FT, as it turns out, was a very poorly run company and that's it. It's like if Fidelity or Schwab (places you'd keep money that FDIC doesn't cover) went under - sucks, but we knowingly took that risk (or should have) going in.

Keep in mind that it's very likely Pokerstars was equally mismanaged but escaped by virtue of Isle of Man having stricter restrictions.

You keep on comparing poker sites to banks or investment houses. You don't get it. Player deposits were NOT investments. Poker sites are NOT banks.

And obviously FT did not adhere to their agreements with Alderney. That is why Alderney stripped them of their license. That is why they are out of business now.

[jobber123rd]

Originally Posted by Do it Right

The DoJ is willing to prove in court that offering online poker to US players is, as they have always stated, illegal. So far as I can tell the sites are not exactly racing to the challenge of proving it was legal, something they could have done anytime in the past half decade and stopped the tens of millions in seizures and other DoJ activity against them.

It was clearly +EV for PS and FT to operate as they did with respect to the legal situation in the US, as it allowed them to flourish in the US market in a way that would have been impossible after any sort of legal challenge (obviously, if they lost, they'd be out, but if they won, they'd have gotten a lot more competition). So why rock the boat?

[TheDarkElf]

Originally Posted by jobber123rd

It was clearly +EV for PS and FT to operate as they did with respect to the legal situation in the US, as it allowed them to flourish in the US market in a way that would have been impossible after any sort of legal challenge (obviously, if they lost, they'd be out, but if they won, they'd have gotten a lot more competition). So why rock the boat?

It certainly wasn't profitable for FTP to "eat" $115M in lost processor funds. That is probably more money than they netted in the same amount of time.

Oh wait, they didn't eat it. They used player funds to make up the diff.

[1aca]

Originally Posted by t_roy

Well, to start with we know that they did not keep player deposits in segregated accounts. The only reason to do this would be that the company would not have enough money to cover it’s operating expenses if it did not use player deposits. Instead of just letting the players’ money sit in a bank account, a poker site can instead use that money to invest in growing the site more quickly than it would have otherwise been able to. Like it or not this is actually a perfectly legitimate way to run a poker site. It’s kind of like when you deposit your money in a bank. The bank doesn’t just let it sit there. The bank keeps a certain amount on hand to cover that money that it’s customers may withdraw. The rest, it invests and makes money off of it. A poker site could very legitimately do exactly the same thing.

I beg to differ. Show me a poker site where the terms and conditions allow for something like this and I'll show you a poker site that's out of business in days.

[callipygian]

Originally Posted by t_roy

lol and I'm the myopic one. Do you have any knowledge of business law whatsoever or are you just pulling the "it's not illegal" part out of your own brain?

Name a law they've broken.

Originally Posted by TheDarkElf

And obviously FT did not adhere to their agreements with Alderney. That is why Alderney stripped them of their license.

They certainly were not in compliance at the time their license was suspended; but the real question is whether they were ever in compliance.

Because if, indeed, FT was simply a criminal organization and/or Ponzi scheme, then they were never in compliance. If it so happens that they fell below the working capital ratios that Alderney required (through whatever fault - DOJ, payment processor theft, gross negligence, etc.) - then they're a stupid organization, not a criminal one.

Why are you reading my posts anyway? I thought you said you stopped.

[TheDarkElf]

Originally Posted by callipygian

Because if, indeed, FT was simply a criminal organization and/or Ponzi scheme, then they were never in compliance. If it so happens that they fell below the working capital ratios that Alderney required (through whatever fault - DOJ, payment processor theft, gross negligence, etc.) - then they're a stupid organization, not a criminal one.

Lining their pockets with our funds does not make them stupid - it makes them THIEVES.