I used to be more active on these forums and haven't posted for some time but thought this was deserving of a post. I check out HSDB every once in a while to see how Isildur is doing despite not being in the poker scene myself and saw they wrote an article on ACR/BCP which basically stated they have such severe financial problems that I walked away thinking they are on the brink of collapse.

I came here to see if there were any discussions on the topic but I didn't see a single topic on NVG/HSNL XFER/INTERNET poker so I thought to myself perhaps no one else saw it.

I was very active on BCP for several years and while I had my issues with the software and connectivity issues on BCP they were always excellent with any financial issues - withdrawals and player 2 player transfers were absolutely outstanding IMO.

The article implies criminal activity on the level of lock poker and FTP and I always look to give people the benefit of the doubt especially when I myself had excellent interactions with them.

I haven't kept up many 2 + 2 relationships so there was no one to really reach out to to find out what is going on. I did find a counter argument to article on HSDB which can be
Looking forward to the communities thoughts on this topic. Have people been experiencing these problems? Is this a legit fear to be wary of?

article surprised me too but I made three btc withdrawals in July totaling 5k or more combined and all three were received within 40 hours

The final paragraph directing people to ignition sets off my bs alarm. Good chance this is a plant.

Also the giant Ignition ad that pops up when you open the site.

Bcp/acr has been amazing with their cashouts for over a year now. 0 signs of liquidity problems. I just requested a cash out Wednesday night and received Friday afternoon. With that said they are still operating illegally and precautions should be made, just as with ignition

Wow. How is a link to that article being posted with anything other than complete disdain for it being a horrible hack job?

Let's break it down:

The first paragraph is about slow cashouts, with people supposedly waiting weeks "with some players waiting weeks or in some cases months for withdrawals to be made good". The source provided is a screen clipping of a post from this thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/21...cp-tp-1332245/

Which is a great place to find out more, as it's the main thread on our forums for deposit/withdrawal questions and concerns. I'm not up-to-speed on current cashout times at WPN, so I certainly wanted to find out more when I saw this thread. The first thing I noticed is that there were a total of 14 posts in the month of July, and I don't see a single one of those complaining about a withdrawal taking weeks or months.

So what about that post they clipped? Conveniently, you might notice, with the date of the post left out, and no link to where it came from so you can check it out for yourself. On the surface, it seems rather concerning, given that it's talking about a cashout from May 2, and it's now August. However, maybe not so concerning since that post is from May 4:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=4042

I don't know how it turned out, but given that the poster hasn't posted in that thread since, I'd assume it was paid out fairly soon after. As a matter of fact, I see he was in the P2P transfer thread a couple of weeks ago, looking to buy ACR money. Yeah, he seems real concerned.

And keep in mind this is the one and only thing they have to support their assertion of withdrawals now sometimes taking weeks and months. This is the best they could do - a player expressing some concern 3 months ago that they hadn't received their withdrawal yet, in 2 days. Seriously?

Then there is the next paragraph, which ends on a pretty amazing note. So, it starts with "it is worth noting that some players have noticed that BTC withdrawals only seem to be processed when BTC value is at its highest, after which the price drops off - which obviously benefits the site and certainly not the player", but provides nothing to back it up with. I'm not going to dig through all the BTC posts to try and find what they're talking about, since apparently the article writer can't even be bothered to do so.

But that's not the part of the paragraph that concerns me most; the ending is:

"There have also been complaints about the excessive cost to play at the site with rake estimated at between 10-15% depending on which deposit method you use."

Followed by another screen clipping, with the caption

"Above: Huge rake %'s make it difficult to turn a profit at WPN - Source 2+2"

That sounds pretty concerning. Rake of 10-15% making it difficult to turn a profit - yeah, I think it would be impossible! Only if you read the post they clipped, it's extremely clear that what people are talking about is the amount of money needed to rake before you are allowed to withdraw (a policy many sites have to make sure costs are covered and/or anti-money laundering regulations are complied with) - it has nothing to do with high rake and in no way affects player profitability. The author here shows an incredible lack of understanding of what he's reading, or a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Then we have two paragraphs about alleged embezzlement, but they "cannot confirm the above rumours as fact". Nice.

And finally, they finish up with silliness about a suspension of BTC deposits and withdrawals on August 1 - that would be the day there was a Bitcoin fork, and having money moving back and forth via Bitcoin clearly would have been quite risky for players. The article even goes on to say that is was "due to scheduled changes in the bitcoin software", but still saw fit to screenshot a bunch of Facebook posts people made in the midst of the suspension, trying to make it look like yet another piece of concerning evidence.

And then, as others have mentioned, the article finishes up with an affiliate link to Ignition poker.

I'm not commenting on how things are at WPN right now - I don't play there or regularly read their forum, so I couldn't say with absolute certainty. But I haven't heard of any concerns, and I would expect the article would be providing the most egregious examples they could find, yet the ones they did offer were ridiculous.

But I sell ads for 2+2, including to WPN, so don't just take my word for it. If anyone is concerned, they should check out the deposits/withdrawals thread link eearlier, or other threads in their forum here. I'm sure you'll find some complaints about any number of things, as there are for all poker sites somewhere on our forums. But I'm far from convinced there's anything that would raise alarm bells with withdrawal times at the moment.

This is, easily, one of the worst poker articles I've seen. Nothing but a lot of bogus claims to drum up concern about a site where none appears to be warranted, in an effort to drive people to their affiliate link for a different poker room. Not surprising that the author is shown simply as "Pete". If I was to write something like this, I wouldn't want my name attributed to it either.

Closed and links in OP removed.

OP requested that we reopen this with a title change, so after discussion with R*R, that's what we've done. I'll check with OP on the new title.

Also, someone PMed me to correct what I said about the Bitcoin fork. His assertion is that there was no risk, and that WPN did it "because they effectively made an instant 15% profit on their entire float since they would control the pre-fork keys to the money".

My reply to him was that he likely knows a lot more about this than I do. I just know there were people in Internet Poker cautioning others not to have any money in Bitcoin exchanges when the fork happened. It could well be that others shared that concern, and WPN erred on the side of caution. Or maybe he's right. Either way, it certainly doesn't support anything in that article, not that he was saying it does.

What the person that PM'd you didn't know is that, just like everything else money related, offshore gambling companies use 3rd party processors. Processing transactions in house would be a huge legal liability for offshore sites and more or less destroy many of their legality arguments in a court of law. This is a liability that I'm not aware of any of them taking on.

Even for cryptocurrency 3rd party processing is used. At least by the offshore sites that also deal in fiat. The small crypto only companies very likely do hold much/all of their deposits in house because they have very different KYC/AML procedures in place. Or in many cases, none at all.

--
Kahn

I am grateful this thread has been reopened. As I've said to several people through PM the value of this incident can be had by the regrettable understanding that hsdb is not reporting news or looking out for the online poker community as they pretended to be doing here. It may be common knowledge to many active members of the online community that they no longer do that but for people like me who aren't aware I believe this thread serves a useful purpose

I saw this article on FB with a big WTF? Even called them out for the BS article but no reply.

I've never once had any problems withdrawing from ACR - i've probably made around 10 withdraws in the past 5 years. In fact, most of the time ACR has been faster than stars back in the 2000's.

That person is wrong. One, WPN doesn't own the BTC, it's a 3rd party processor. So either the 3rd party processor will use the forked btc (bch) keys, or they won't. WPN won't ever touch them. As you stated originally, there was risk moving on aug 1. Anyone that thinks there wasn't has hindsight bias. I never heard anyone recommend anything but to get keys off exchanges, hold them privately, and don't send them at or around aug 1, for fear of missing out on ownership of the BCH keys. AFAIK all the exchanges (eg. coinbase, which is one of the largest exchange) suspended btc transactions Aug 1. Further, the 3rd party company doesn't even hold BTC in the name of users. If you deposit BTC into WPN, your balance on WPN is shown in USD. Then when you withdraw it converts your USD balance to BTC. You don't actually play with BTC. There's a reasonable chance the 3rd party processor handling this doesn't even hold BTC, but just uses a larger exchange's API to facilitate the trades being made (BTC->USD, USD->BTC) and takes a small cut. It's absolutely ludicrous to suggest this was all a scam by WPN, when it was the industry standard, no way for them to profit off it, and likely the 3rd party processor didn't profit off it either.

Good to know I may not have been far off with the Bitcoin stuff, thanks guys. I mean, it really shouldn't have made a difference because the article was only using that as more mud to throw on the wall about cashouts, but I thought it was best to clear up any confusion lest I lend even the slightest bit of credibility to the article by getting something wrong.

Yeah, that's what I find most bothersome about it. It's an article written to give the illusion that it's sharing big news to help the community when it's instead a misleading hack job, and using materials from our forums to "support" their claims.

Agree completely. People need to be aware of the practices of some websites when they read poker "news" elsewhere, and always read it with a critical eye. Many sites are affiliates, and unfortunately some will skew things based on their financial interests - people need to watch for this. Just like they would be right in keeping an eye on threads about our advertisers - I think we're pretty good about allowing criticism and being even-handed about moderation of it, we're not perfect.

And that's also not to say that every piece of news you'll see posted here is going to be 100% accurate - far from it. But if there's something posted here that's deliberately misleading to benefit someone financially, it will likely be deleted, or at the very least I expect it would be called out quickly by other posters.

I do notice that HSDB doesn't have a WPN affiliate while having the majority of other US facing sites. Makes me wonder if something went sour in their relationship with WPN affiliates which led to the hack job.

ftr i've played on wpn on and off for years, and even though tbh i have tons of problems with the way they run the network, cashouts have always been v smooth

never thought id say this but, fake news.

lol at "here is a link to ignition, we want you to play there instead". Just like the email I received from PokerVIP couple weeks ago " 888 is terrible, play at Party instead and rake us lots of monies"
Affiliates are scum!

PokerVIP's parent company is the same as HSDB's

Anyway someone could pressure HSDB to issue an apology and retraction? Seems only fair to WPN.

There are scummy affiliates, but not all affiliates are scum. It's a shame for those who aren't when others sully the industry by pulling stuff like this.

LOL, that's awesome.

Well, given pmarr's revelation, that seems...unlikely.

Yeah seems that they don't offer anymore Winning network I mean you won't find a deal on either pokervip,pokertube or highstakesdb for winning network so definitely something happened behind the scenes.

Still doesn't make your affiliate business look super professional when you flame some site with questionable article because you got butt hurt. Although they probably alsolost a ton of money given they don't offer the deal now on winning network and winning network is now quite big.

I stopped playing on ACR ages ago, their withdrawals were ridiculously slow and taking the link to the article out the OP is basically censoring free speech.

Should welcome people calling out shady rooms, not enough do

I've been playing here since 2012, there has literally never been cash out problems. I make a withdrawal a few times a month, all are fast, and some are less than 24 hours...... but yes, tell us more about how you don't play there but know they're shady, you have our attention.

Scummy affiliates gonna scum. HSDB should be ashamed of themselves.

I've made several withdrawals from ACR this year, all super fast and easy. Slowest was a BTC withdrawal that took 4 days, but there was a weekend in between.