Cheers - currently wiping beer from my monitor!

Not really. Good article, though.

Diamond_Flush,i love to read your posts,you sound so positive and full of reason compared to the 'regulars' in this thread......
I have a lot of money stuck at FTP and what really gets me down is to read this thread for info and see all the rigtards/pessimists/people with no money on FTP that get a bizarre pleasure to see others suffer etc engage in their daily routine of talking down the chances that any of us will ever see our money again.
You and a few others are like Don Quijote fighting windmills,but please keep it up...!!!

I mean.. we did sorta release for the first time the correct total amount seized by the DOJ and the amount seized on Black Friday, which IMHO is a very important figure. In doing so, we corrected a figure that was widely believed and caused people to completely misinterpret the current situation. For example, some people naturally thought that $200M was seized on Black Friday as a result of the AGCC's staetment, which obviously completely changes who is responsible for the current mess and to whom we should be looking for our money. These are figures that we've been desperate to report since Black Friday, and it was my understanding that a lot of people wanted them. Admittedly, FTP sorta half released them on August 30th.

We also uncovered what amounts to either fraud or incredible negligence that led to a libelous statement about the US DOJ by a foreign government agency, which is kind of a big deal IMO.

We also showed systematic attempts by the AGCC to avoid culpability for this and their refusal to publish a correction until we informed them that we were publishing our own correction.

I mean.. obv you can have whatever opinion you want about the article. But I feel like you're probably misunderstanding something if you think it's a small story. If anything, it's a sort of strange collection of three big stories.

I don't really see how this is an AGCC story, it's not like they made up the numbers. It seems clear that FTP just kept all of their cost of doing business after the UIGEA losses on the books as liquid assets, uncleared e-checks apparently fit their definition of letters of credit.

From my perspective the real story here is that even if FTP held out some fairytale hope of the DOJ unfreezing all their funds, all e-checks clearing and money stolen by Tzvetkoff being returned, they still didn't have enough assets to cover all deposits on March 31st, yet they paid themselves $10m in dividends on April 1 - April Fools day indeed.

I think you're misinterpretting the article. He means some/all/a lot of the 159 million seized is no longer in thr hands of the Doj. They already gave it away to other entities within the govt.

#2 That's what I felt.

Guilt counter:

-2 for DOJ
+15 for AGCC

How can the DOJ spend the money even if this story hasnt playd out yet? So they seized approx. $160M and keep this in their own pockets, wow.
I mean, is there no way this $160M would go to their rightful owners (the players) now?

So even if the DOJ transfered this money to another institution of the government, shouldnt it be easily reducible in case FTP would go bankrupt? I mean they essentially seized players funds, and not paying back at least a propotion of what they seized, is commiting fraud aswell.

Tons of people who post IIT think that anyone who expresses an opinion that is pessimist about the possibility of a FTP sale is:

• a shill for another site (or the AGCC or the DOJ);
• a (invariably not good) player who has very little money on the site;
• someone who is enjoying watching other people suffer.

It comes to no surprise to me there are tons of these people in the world.

What is really sad is how the 2+2 mods just let it go on endlessly.

What does this mean? Escrow, investigating or what? Are they gonna give the money they seized to the players eventually or where does it go?

Are people actually going to start blaming the DOJ again? Don't do that imo.

Stick with a simple narrative.

my name on ftp is MarkFSU1, u can go look up my stats for ftp or see scores on p5. I am not very optimistic about the sale at all an I have well into 5 figures locked up on the site. Ive got buddies with 6 figs locked up and theyve all already written the money off and everytime some new "good news" comes out about ftp they constantly say, nope the money is gone, were seriously never getting paid...

I dont blame them for seizing it. At least they had some kind of reason to. But keeping this money instead of transferring it back to the rightful owners would be blamable, dont you think.

The DOJ is not one entity and the $158,793,000 was not one seizure. The Southern District of New York seized about $40 million from FTP (both in FTP acconuts and payment processor accounts) on Black Friday, and I'm like 99% sure that none of that has been disbursed.

However, the remaining $115-120Mish was seized from payment processors over the past four years by a variety of DOJ entities with their own jurisdicions and their own policies. Diamond can tell you a lot better than I can how all this breaks up, but some of this money was forfeited to whichever US Attorney's Office seized it when they didn't put up a trial, some of it was forfeited after trial (though FTP never directly defended itself), some of it was forfeited by settlement (though, again, FTP never participated in these settlement discussions), and some of it is still seized/frozen pending litigation.

Obviously the DOJ didn't hold onto all that money anticipating this current crisis.

I don't know the precedence concerning this.

But its not coming back to us if they've already spent or disbursed it. You can be sure about that.

I would assume that the DOJ is sitting on the BF seizures however...

(Edit: I obviously totally misread TDE's post. I figure I'll leave this up since it's been quoted already.)

This is absurd. What the mods (e.g. me) should probably be doing a better job of is deleting crap like this that assumes that just because someone has a different opinion from you, they must have something wrong with them.

I mean.. I'm pessimistic about the future of the global climate system. This is not because I'm a shill for a solar power company or someone who has very little stake in the climate or because I want to watch people suffer. This is because, based on my knowledge of the issue, which admittedly is quite incomplete, my gut feeling is pessimistic.

I just don't see how you can't understand that. There are people with lots of money on FTP who are very pessimistic and people with no money on FTP who are very optimistic.

There's also no harm in people expressing their pessimistic opinions in this thread. They add to the discussion.

To some extent, pessimistic views are extremely healthy in this situation. That's not to say that I think that they're correct (I'm not going to give my assessment of the chances of a deal going through because people will think it carries more weight than it does), but simply that mashing refresh on this thread waiting for your money to come back is probably much less fulfilling then writing off the money, moving on, and, if it does eventually come back, treating it as a pleasant surprise.

If the doj has only 40-50mil from payment processors on BF and given thr current bleak outlook for players being repaid, I can defintely see this impacting any kind of settlements ferguson, rafe, and howard are likely trying to engage in.

does anyone know the chances of getting our money back eventually?

Sorry, but posts like this are rampant.

All they do is contain personal attacks which are not even factual.

I believe he was actually trying to say you (mods) should be defending his right to be a pessimist, rather than suggest you ban the pessimists.

I guess you just did.

FWIW, I wasn't attempting to suggest that the article wasn't important, only that it didn't meet the "big news" criteria for starting an entirely new thread in NVG about it. If the majority disagree, I would bow to that consensus.

Otherwise I think it's a great article, and love that the AGCC finally responded only after you basically told them, we know you're wrong, and we're going to tell everyone you were wrong.

It's such a joke that SP does the job AGCC should be doing.

And how often do you (or anyone) report such posts when they occur? The mods don't sit in threads waiting to pounce the instant someone steps out of line. If you (or anyone) don't like the tenor of this thread (or any thread), report the offending posts so the mods know there is a problem in that thread and we can take action.

But to a certain degree, we do allow people to vent in this thread, particularly when they are venting directly at FTP or at the situation in general. I agree that people who can't debate without calling everyone who disagrees with them a (insert your favorite insult here) should be subject to intervention, and we do the best we can to delete/edit those posts when they become rampant, but its absurd to think that the handful of mods can possibly catch everything, particularly in a thread with over 100K views and 10K posts.

Oh, man.. I suck. Totally misread your post, TDE. Sorry about that . Obviously I meant to agree with you .

FWIW, I mostly don't do anything about those posts that include both content and one of those weird accusations because it seems like it might do more harm than good. We've made a bunch of attempts in this thread to make people stop doing it, and we've followed through with deletions and infractions, etc., but it just seems to be something that people really really want to say and we're fighting a losing war there.

If you report a post (red exclamation point thingy under the avatar), it's WAY more likely to get deleted because one of the less laissez faire mods will take a look then. Plus, I'll at least know that I'm not the only one who's annoyed by it.

Fair enough.

No reason to apologize. I did a piss poor job of expressing myself in that post.