Maybe there is a chance of setting some community company with shares and buy UP and make a board and run it ourselves with our own money?

But, they are the first step. Resolving those issues allows them more solid footing to begin intense US lobbying and deal making. Obviously, PS has been the best at making free money off the poker market, and I think they are sizing their bet correctly. Though they could use a better lobbying and organizing arm than the shoestring PPA locked in on the Feds.

As ridiculous as this sounds, if someone were to do this with the same payout restraints as the Tapie deal, it would probably be really cheap. I mean the Tapie deal was awful, but its A LOT better than nothing. I believe in the Tapie payout structure $15million could be immediately withdrawn by players (which accounted for 95% of accounts) and the other 5% of accounts, totaling $300million would have to play a certain amount before having portions of their balance available to withdraw. If someone were to try this with UB/AP the numbers would be much less, far less than the actual amount seized by the DOJ. But there lies a problem in this plan..... the company would have to be allowed to operate in the US in order for players to work off their balances. If the DOJ would allow this, in theory the seized funds could be used to restart the company under new management with payout restrictions. Although, this probably will never happen.

Forget about all of those scenarios. Focus on right now.

Anytime over the next few weeks the DOJ will receive a bunch of money from Stars. If the DOJ does care about all players getting paid (FTP+UB) BUT they do not intend on giving away seized money they need to get the $50m from Stars. The DOJ already has Beckley going to jail but they know they are not catching Scott Tom and his cash.

I understand the DOJ is not in the business of "looking good" but getting close to a billion dollars and completely ignoring the UB/AP players would look bad. They won't admit it but they screwed up pretty bad on the UB/AP side of things.

I agree to some extent with this. It does seem unlikely that after all thats gone on, that UB players would be left out to rust. It seems more likely that over the past year the DOJ has been working with blank rome to find some solution to repay UB players (what % we don't know). I do believe that this deal that Stars is striking with the DOJ should help our cause because we see that the DoJ is attempting to refund players in full and I think its safe to assume that they've at least been working to do the same for UB players. Let us all hope this ends with a good conclusion and very very soon

Stars is not buying UB. US Govt is not giving money they receive as penalties from Stars to UB players. Stars is not paying "extra" money to the US Govt so that UB players can get paid. Brent Beckley signed a plea deal and will get at most 6 months in jail, imo. I agree the DOJ looks really dumb right now.

How does the US "catch" people like Saddam and Osama but not catch Tom Scott? The only thing I don´t understand is that a company that used to be really big for several years and has made millions of dollars(otherwise the former owners could not buy their fancy houses and stuff) are unable to pay back the players.
Is it really that easy in the US to scam people and than just leave the company and not be responsible for it? It was posted in this thread before all the former UB/AP owners are super rich multi millionaires who live a baller lifestyle. And its obv with or money and its obv who these people are. I am not an expert on law so I don´t expect to understand the full impact of the situation but to me it seems like scamming in the US seems to be a somewhat easy to do.

Other than that I also share the opinion that it is kinda our own fault as well. And by that I don´t mean the fact of having large amounts of money on the site I also mean that not doing that much actively after BF has happened. How many of you have actually taken time to contact the DoJ or directly phone the KGC? Pre Black Friday Cereus was the 3-5 largest Poker network on the market. So there is a bunch of young and intelligent people but no real action was taken. There have been a few posts about making taking legal actions but has anyone actually tried anything or directly contacted a lawyer? Maybe we could have gotten money out of KGC but we do not have a clue about the laws of the quebecoise or mohawk territory.

Talking about GBT buying Cereus in this thread certainly wont accomplish anything. Most likely it is a dead end anyway and I am sure some people also tried to contact people they now but thats just the exception. I just don´t like loosing where a fight did not happen.

If you really want your money back I believe that you have to do something for it. Me for instance, I have gotten back more money than probably(not sure but I got more money out of Cereus than anybody who has posted something before) any other person on Cereus and it was only because I put in more effort than most. Still I got 5 digits of money on that site.

It might be a longshot but maybe we could try something before the 8th of may. Like directly contacting and making pressure on the DoJ or writing an united letter of XX-XXX players maybe putting in some individual stories and stuff. Or also taking legal advice if we could maybe make the KGC responsible for this. I have read through their agreement and there are several points that they have failed. Another possible option would be to contact the KGC and "threaten" them to inform every possible person on every KGC licensed gambling sites(not only the poker ones.. theres a bunch of them) and inform the players that their money is not safe and use this as leverage. Maybe these things wont help as well.. most likely it wont but I still better than talking sci-fi in this thread.

Just my 2 cents...

From Bond_18 on twitter: A source from @Pokerstars recently told me they also intend to purchase UB and repay their players because "We're that ****ing awesome".

Very likely he's joking but hey, I'm an optimist.

Edit: confirmed joking.

There's a difference between doing something about it and senselessly wasting your time. It's great you were in a position where you could get a significant amount of your money back from Cereus but a lot of us simply weren't in that position.

To me "putting pressure" on the DOJ or attempting to find a way to make the KGC responsible is just as sci-fi. A bunch of us have made calls to the DOJ. How exactly do we put pressure on them?

GatorXP has made contact with the KGC several times on behalf of a large portion of the players on here that are owed money. This interaction doesn't seem to me to be any different than the way the DOJ has been.

Servers Down?

For whatever it's worth :
At some time in the last week, (think it was Monday the 7th) I encountered problems logging into UB. (I check my account balance every few weeks just for giggles) It was a very slow login, but was able to get in. When i logged out, I was (and have not been able to) re-log in. Their servers seem to be down (Yes, we all expected it eventually, was surprising they were up as long as they were).
I sent E-mail to support, received reply within 2 days (this was a real surprise to get a response).

I sent:
Hello,
Q : Are your servers still up?
I was thinking that your servers have gone down perhaps?
I was trying to log on to check my account balance and have not been able to do so for a couple of days.
Just wondering... plz reply

They replied:
Dear Player,
Thank you for your email.
Our technical team is aware and looking to resolve the client-connectivity issue
and lobby/games situation. At the moment we are not able to provide you with a
time frame.
Thank you for your patience.
Best Regards,
Elizabeth
UB Tech Support
TechSupport@UB.net


Just thought I'd share my experience...
Is anyone currently able to login to Cereus servers? Or is it just me?

yeah, stuck on "establishing SSL connection" for me

I did not say it was a done deal or that it was likely to happen. The sudden presence of Stars and their deep pockets gives UB players the only hope they have had to get paid in full (even if it's a small hope). They are willing to overpay a large sum for assets they don't really need (all in a form of a fine).

Even with their jurisdiction that protects them from a lot of things, the KGC will not be feeling great if UB/AP is to never pay players back and even worse if the DOJ deems Cereus to have been a criminal organization like FTP.

The latter seems unlikely given that the DOJ is smart enough to realize that no money can be extracted from the UB owners by doing so (all the money/assets are in Panama and Antigua) and that a statement like that would characterize players as victims and eligible for a small reimbursement. FTP owners on the other hand had plenty of US assets, which in part explains the aggressive approach the DOJ took against them.

when can i withdraw my UB money? its been a while

When was the next deadline for another statement? I know it was in May but not sure when

Tomorrow

Where do can we read the statement when its released? I wasn't able to read/find the last statement until someone posted it in this thread a few days later. Think it will just be another delay? Only thing that changed now is UB/AP is no longer running.

Typically there hasn't been any news or updates on the days of the previous deadlines, we usually hear something a few days later and up until this point it has always just been another deadline extension. I am hoping we hear something concrete this time around but I guess we will have to wait and see.

This was something I intended to edit into my previous message but then 2+2 collapsed.

Some additional options:

* Contacting GBT and offering them Cereus. They could buy the 3-5 largest Room pre BF with a good software for a lot less.

* Contacting Pokerstars and convincing them to buy Cereus or at least soak up the player pool. This would result in Pokerstars expanding their role as market leader as well as giving them good promo for saving a failed experiment and actually helping people getting their money back. This would also cause maybe scene legends like guigui or some former UB/AP pros(OK not talking about Joe Sebok here) to join Pokerstars and lead to some good medial responses as well.

*An alternative option to PS buying Cereus would be that we arrange some sort of agreement that we get back our money by playing. Maybe a 1:1 rake for money deal which would result in Pokerstars not loosing any money at all(correct me if I am wrong here) but gaining some players and an even better image within the Poker/Gambling community.


For all of these(and possible other) options to happen we guys need to actually do something about it. Looking at the "can we discuss Cereus specificall" thread once a month wont help us. It has not worked for a year. If you want a certain site to take action, why not actively contact them? Why not organize and present them a deal on the table? To be honest it does not seem like Cereus is going to nail the deal. Like I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of intelligent young grinders out there with large amounts of money on this site so why not try to convince some 3rd parties that buying up UB/AP and paying back the players might result in a success.

Even if it does not work its not too bad. Everything is better than just waiting and seeing that nothing happens. Again I assure you I am not optimistic about this issue but I think there is a reason I got out almost 15k out of UB and AP and It was not because I waited and waited and got picked by the Cereus lottery!

Although ur intentions r good w these posts I don't think the bullet points r likely to happen at all.

First I think that if UB has already or does successfully sell their software and player base it will be to an anonymous third party, we will prob never know who bought it if someone does bc they won't want the public knowing that it's UB software. They would likely make some changes to it. Second i think it's unlikely that gbt would purchase it but not Impossible. I do believe a more likely scenario is that the doj has been working w blank Rome to find a us buyer for the inevitable opening of the us online poker market. It seems that would have a good chance of working since it would appeal to us buyers bc the majority of their player base was us and we all loved the software.

I do find it odd that just recently we are all unable to log in. It does not seem likely to me that there is all of a sudden some technical issue or problem with the servers, when the site has been open and functioning for a year after bf. So I do believe that there is something going on behind the scenes here but only time will tell. I very much hope we hear something significant soon.

I do also think that it is out of our hands at this point. It seems the case is nearing its end from a legal standpoint and I think it's safe to assume they have come to some conclusions regarding how this will work out for FTP and UB players. Who knows what that conclusion entails.

^^ this

You can't do much at this point. UB/AP assets could very well haven been sold by now if it was not for the DOJ/all sorts of legal issues that any buyer has to deal it. With that being said, if the DOJ has the right intentions a miracle could happen down the road.

The only miracle I can see happening for us to get fully repaid is for Cereus to be included in the Stars deal.

Anyone else getting tons of spam to the email registered with your UB account lately? I have a seperate email address for each service I use (so that I can shut it down if it gets sold for marketing etc.) and the email I used just for UB is getting a lot of spam mails in the last couple of weeks.

Guess they are looking for that last resort to make some money...

most likely due to the UB email leak not them selling it

i think its most likely due to the 2+2 hack, i've been getting a ton of spam...could be the ub leak tho too i guess

Yeah.. when someone leaks a ton of e-mail addresses publicly, it's not too long before it gets to spammers.