hi guys
I was palying last Tuesday spin ang go max tournaments in pokerstars when their servers crashed! one of the tournament I was playing at the time was cancelled after the crush and was rolled forward fast. then they accidentaly send to all of the palyers in the tournament at the time 11000 euros! by mistake....
I live in Greece and the policy of taxing here is, if your daily income in internet pokers is more than 100euros per day you get taxed at 7 am. that's why when you win and leave pokerstars a message from pokerstars pop up telling you to sign in longterms big tournaments in order to get down your daily income!
when I got the whoops money I sighned all the money in longterms tournaments, and then lefta pokerstars...
next day I woke up and resigned from all of them so by balance was the same as the day before. then pokerstars froze my account and I couldn't do anything for the day!
next morning at 7 am I got taxed with 1800 euros and my balance went down. after that pokerstars withdrew all the money that had been accidentaly sent to me leaving my account with a dept of 2100 dollars!
now they are accusing me tha I took andvantage of this mistake and that I spent a big amount of the money by playing and that I owe them! are they serius
what can I do now? their support is responding every 26 hours and its annoying

Keep communicating with support, patiently.

1800 tax and now your account is -2100....looks like Stars is right. Assuming you were on 0 when you received the incorrect refund, you have been playing with 300€ which were not yours.

Obv you should look to get the (also) mistaken tax back.

1800 euros 2100 dollars something like this! I didn't play anything

Sry, didn't pay attention for the currencies. The tax you should get back, so hopefully within a few days all is cleared up.

Wait, Stars actually tell you to indulge in tax evasion? I find that hard to believe, but regardless, oh well, pay your taxes

Edit - thinking about it I can see why Amaya would say that, if it's taxed you can't then lose it to them in rake

I don't think it is tax evasion. I don't really know much about Greece tax system, but from the little I do know this seems to be completely standard.

Greece's tax system is awful. Players get taxed every day on winnings from that day. If you have a losing day, nothing happens that day, but you cannot use the losses to offset winnings on other days.

But if you register for a tournament that starts in a month (for example), then the buy-in is deducted from winnings you had that day. Then later if you unregister before the tournament starts, then on the day that you unregister you have winnings in the amount of the buy-in.

So, as I understand, what people do if they have a winning day is they register for a tournament far in the future to reduce their wins on that day for tax purposes. Then when they have a losing day they unregister from the tournament, so they can use that day's losses against the income from unregistering.

I guess I don't actually know whether it is tax evasion or completely fine, but it seems like everyone does it and I think PokerStars even creates tournaments that are pretty much just for people to register/unregister as described above. I guess I've always assumed it was legal to do.

The above might not all be completely accurate. I don't really know much of anything about the Greece tax system; just a little of what I have picked up from 2+2.


From what I can tell, the Original Poster was in a tough spot here. He was credited money that he didn't actually win and so wasn't his. If he used it to register tournaments with the plan to unregister later, then he would technically be using money that is not his. But if he did not register those tournaments, then he wold get charged tax on the money that he received that isn't his.

And what PokerStars did was (i) mistakenly credit money to his account, (ii) after he registered and unregistered from tournaments one day (presumably with the intention to re-register the next day (I don't know why this was necessary unless original poster was trying to give Stars a chance to take back the money and fix the mistake)) lock his account so that he couldn't register for tournaments the next day to offset the incorrect winnings, (iii) pay tax from his account to the Greece government based on the incorrect winnings, (iv) remove the incorrect winnings from his account causing his account to go negative since they already took some of those winnings to pay taxes on them and (v) accuse original poster of taking advantage of the mistakenly paid winnings and spending such money so that he now has to re-pay them; from the original poster's story the "spending" of the money was Stars taking it to pay taxes on income that the original poster shouldn't have actually had.


I would hope that PokerStars could fix this issue for him and fix their reporting to the Greece government and recover the incorrectly paid tax.

Assuming the story in the original post is 100% accurate it doesn't seem the original poster did anything wrong. PokerStars gave him money by mistake (the "Incorrect Payout"). PokerStars took money from him to pay to Greece taxes on the Incorrect Payout. PokerStars then took back all of the Incorrect Payout because it was mistakenly paid in the first place, which created a shortfall in the original poster's account since a percentage of the Incorrect Payout was already taken from the original poster's account by PokerStars and given to Greece, and demanded the original poster pay the shortfall without giving back to the original poster the money they took to pay to Greece the taxes on the Incorrect Payout.


Probably a comedy of errors with support people at PokerStars not understanding what is happening, resulting in them demanding that original poster effectively pay back greater than 100% of the money that PokerStars mistakenly paid him and blaming him for trying to take advantage of the mistake and "spending" some of the money (spending by PokerStars taking it to give to Greece).


I would hope that once somebody at Stars realizes what happened, they would be able to fix it.

This is one of the rare threads of this type where I actually feel the OP is telling a fairly accurate story, and it was a mess of a situation.

I can understand why he had a panic reflex, but realistically the best thing to be done in spots like this is notify Pokerstars immediately of their error along with concern that this will result in a tax hit on money that should never have been there (and will be removed).

I agree, but unfortunately the registering for tournaments (while everyone does indeed do it because of the stupid tax rules there) really gums up this situation, because while his explanation is a reasonable one given the tax laws there, it also is what someone trying to keep the money would do - so it blurs the situation and makes it much more of a mess to clean up than if he just let all the money sit there untouched (until this was resolved) and emailed Stars with concern about this when it happened. If he did the latter then this is a no brainer spot to clean up. As played, it is not quite as simple.

While hardly to the scale of this - Party Poker years ago had a similar incident where people got $200 in their account by mistake (was a weird bug tied into their cruise at the time when someone downgraded their room even if they were not on the cruise - and clicking the cruise information link Party sent automatically did this as well as a nice surprise). Tons of people gambooled it away thinking it was free money, but of course they then had a -$200 balance after and could not play there any more (during the huge bonus era) without depositing $200.

Hope OP works this out - tricky spot.

I do feel bad for OP in this situation, i was one who was given a huge refund aswell, i believe i was probably the one to tell stars of the situation as i was one tabling my usual game while on live support to stars to tell them what had happened and as doing so everyone was frozen, and i was forced to sit out and be blinded out however although not admitting fault they were kind enough to reimburse me for the money lost in that game.
If i was Greek then i would of done exactly the same in your situation, assuming you never played the tourneys which stars can check i feel they should take responsibility for such a thing, best you can do is keep on at support and explain your situation to the best of your ability. It must be an awkward situation for them as there were alot of people who did go and reg HS stuff and spew off the money

Big incompetence from Pokerstars. First they made a bad refund, second they took money from OP account based on greece taxing laws and third they withdrew all the bad refund and let him with negative balance =))). The guy who made the bad refunds should assume the mistake and pay the negative balance.

PokerStars are aware of some additional issues surrounding the site crash for Greece players around tax payments, and are currently working to make any affected player whole. Bear with us.

lol @ getting the money back from the greek government. 0,01% chance this will happen.
Either Pokerstars swallows the debt (since it was their mistake) or OP will be stuck with it.

@lego you got it right about this absurd tax law of ours here in Greece.

It's not tax evasion it's a standard legal Tax avoidance.

This stupid law came out for betting/lottery etc back in 2013. Simply put the law says "each winning betting ticket with prizes <=100euros is tax free. €100.01 to €500 15% tax, >500e 20% tax. if it's a losing ticket i don't care i don't deduct your loses from the upcoming winning tickets" . If you go here in the local offline store to place a "bet" the person responsible at the store, SPLITS your bet amount in small chunk tickets SO THAT YOU WIN <=100euros by each ticket, IF you win.

So they included poker in this absurd law, and they count a "poker session" from 07:00am today to 07:00am tomorrow.

About OP, i think he is legit here. Especially if the crash happened close to 7am he was fked. He wouldn't had the time to register to upcoming toyrneys so the 11K was not found by stars auto tax software in his cashier by 7am.

(there is a post in 2p2 where it describes that at the FT of a major tourney with big payouts, one player (greek) almost beg other player to stall the play for 5-10 minutes until HE BUSTS OUT AFTER 7am greek time in order to have 24h time to register his winnings on upcoming tourneys. If he had bust out at 06:50am he wouldn't had the time to do it and he would had paid lots of $$$$ on taxes / edit: found the post , https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/6...47/?highlight=)

Next day OP probably unregister so stars can find the funds in cashier and take back the 11K euros. (he could though keep the money registered to tourneys (in order to avoid been taxed every day at 7am until all this is sorted out) and tell stars "your money are registered on those tourneys, take them from there". but panic probably took him over.

I don't think he registered just to steal the money and play the tourneys. Coz stars would eventually have seen the mistake, and then his balance would be -11k and banned for life.

I hope it works out for you OP.