Interpol has no seizure rights. It would have to be the Isle of Man police, and they're not going to touch 'em.

Settings fail.

Yes this thread is the kind of dumptser fire that give 2+2 a bad name. There needs to be a heavily modded thread which only contains substantive discussion. Make a few new mods if need be. I would be willing to help.

they DONT CARE ABOUT GAMBLING.

omfg... is CASINO / BINGO / SPORTSBOOKING attacked here?

No they went after companies doing mass FRAUD.

They dont care about gambling regulations, or UIGEA, or if we get new sites, or ur freedoms and liberties. They wanted to attack a widespread fraud by shell offshore companies that thought they could just launder and fraud all the money they could from US citizens / banks.

If this had ANYTHING to do with the legit of online poker / gambling... EVERYTHING would be hit... sites way bigger in #'s in the gambling scene then UB ect. This is just dirty dirty people running frauds that were obviously going to **** them in the end. No one cares about ur lovely poker and taking it away from you. We all played on sites that were criminal and they are attacked... might not be fair / just but thats what happened and pretending this is anythign to do about online poker and freedoms is just dumb

Can somone please make a major cliff post and post it in the OP? I'm guessing there are a lot of people who just found out about this and dont want to read 3k+ posts. (Most of which are prob trash anyway)

Hello xxx,

Thank you for contacting PokerStars.

We can confirm that your cashout is currently pending and is being processed as usual.

Furthermore, I please note that that PokerStars will continue to offer its services to all other jurisdictions. As we are not a law firm, it is difficult for us to advise our customers as to the legal situation in every jurisdiction, however the recent change is not targeted in any way at your jurisdiction.

Most importantly, rest assured your funds are safe with PokerStars. We will keep all of our players up-to-date with any future developments.

We sincerely appreciate your understanding and concern, and thank you for choosing PokerStars.

Regards,

Kristian
PokerStars Support Team

there is alot of confusion in this case i hope to clear it up for everybody....of course i am an expert of the ninth degree.....the us govt will seize funds....they will not give it back and pay govt employees their cost of living raises with all of our monies....all because we are all a bunch of degenerates like Laak he rocks by the way......i am a fish anyways so im outta here ohio has lottery and "KENO" yes i said keno wow i can legally dump my money down the drain thanks OHIO....and as far as the US govt...canada do you have any vacancies.....i have always been patriotic most of us have homeland pride but america is a great country the people running it are as crooked and ****ed up as it gets.....outsiders dont hate us americans just our govt.....i can gamble if my govt gets a big portion of my money but heaven forbid if they arent CONNECTED...our govt is so much the mafia.....someday ill prolly work for china anyway and they are bigg time gamblers so please china come over here kick my coutries ass and give me back my pokerz ok? i pray of the day when us americans stick together again and get some real **** done like ousting criminals in our government.....everyone may your pots be monsters.....poker players stick together and lets get this corrected...

No ****! How the mods havn't stepped in yet is ****ing amazing. This thread is about as pointless as the "internet poker is rigged" running thread.

Sticky note the fu*k out of this b*tch please.

Anyone got any links for podcasts or live streams regarding the news? I've tried a link for the current Quadjacks live stream going on now but it keeps on freezing up google chrome on me.

How the f can Andrew Feldman say he expects the named sites be down "worldwide" within 48 hours?

I mean, pokerstars has its headquarters in the Isle of Man.

WTF?

More notable is the whopping 143 cash players on Full Tilt according to pokerscout

+1

Online poker is not what FBI is after here. It is the fraud transactions. Wait and see legit poker sites to start popping up soon.

Looks like we have our latest government "stimulus package".

Meet The Boy Genius Who Just Took Down The Online Poker Industry



The internet is still coming to grips with the huge online gambling bust that just took down the U.S.'s three biggest online poker sites.
But Australia's Courier-Mail newspaper already has the scoop on the one man who may have single-handedly built the online industry ... then handed it to the U.S. government on a platter.
According to this story, Daniel Tzvetkoff was a young Australian entrepreneur who set up the payment processing schemes used by the biggest poker sites to handle their (mostly illegal) transactions.
He is described by those who know him as a "boy wonder" and "genius" who started his first company at 13 and knew all the intricacies of e-commerce.
He made Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars millions of dollars — and made as much as $150,000 a day for himself — but then got even more greedy and started taking their. They sued him, accusing Tzvetkoff of taking more than $100 million of their money.
Then last April, Tzvetkoff was arrested in Las Vegas and charged with the same crimes those sites' founders were charged with today: money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud. As an Australian citizen with a lot of cash, he was considered a flight risk and denied bail.
Then after a "secret" meeting with prosecutors last August, he was suddenly out on bail. And now his former colleagues are the ones facing serious prison time.
Daniel Tzvetkoff knows the operations of these poker sites inside and out. It was knowledge of the financial industry that allowed them to operate. He's the one man positioned to give the U.S. Attorneys everything they needed to take down their businesses.
And it looks like that's exactly what he did, cooperating with the authorities to avoid his own lengthy jail sentence.
All the major gambling prosecutions in the U.S. since Tzvetkoff's arrest have been run out of the office of Arlo Devlin-Brown, the Manhattan Asst. U.S. Attorney who is Tzvetkoff's "handler."
According to a source, Tzvetkoff "knows how to reverse-engineer transactions to determine its original source," making him very valuable to investigators.
And the biggest irony of all? It's been rumored that the only reason the FBI got their hands on him is because Full Tilt or Poker Stars (the companies he used to work for and stole from) tipped off the FBI that he was going to be traveling to the United States last year.
They ratted him out ... and he turned the tables. No honor among thieves.
And as the Courier Mail put it, if this were still the old days, he'd be buried in the Las Vegas desert right now.

So my funds will i get them eventually yes or no?

POKERSTARS AND FTP RATTED....AND DANIEL RATTED RIGHT BACK.

STANDARD MOVE IMO.

BUSINESS AS USUAL. I WOULD HAVE DONE THE EXACT SAME THING.

Here is the best cliff notes summarizing yesterday's events (not written by me; I just copied and paste)

http://calvinayre.com/2011/04/16/leg...atest-updates/

Cliffs:


✖ In the day’s least surprising news, those US land-based casino giants are all disavowing the online poker deals they struck just weeks ago. Wynn Resorts says it has “terminated” its deal with PokerStars, while Fertitta Interactive says its deal with Full Tilt was always contingent on the poker company getting a US gaming license, and so the deal has thus “expired.” We take that definition as having nothing to do with anything time-related, but more to do with the ‘breathing its last’ connotation.

✖ Full Tilt’s CEO Raymond Bitar has released a statement saying he is “surprised and disappointed by the government’s decision to bring these charges,” although he is looking forward “to my exoneration.” In the meantime, Full Tilt recognizes that it “must suspend ‘real money’ play in the US until this case is resolved.”

✖ PokerStars has also suspended US real money play and changed the default URL on its associated sites to PokerStars.eu. Money transfers have also been disabled. ESPN’s Andrew Feldman is speculating that the affected poker sites will shut down across the globe within 48 hours.

✖ Chad Elie, the payment processing figure (and former Intabill staffer) arrested in Nevada, appeared in US Magistrate Court in Las Vegas on Friday, and was subsequently released on his own recognizance (and, presumably, that of his FBI shadow) with a hearing scheduled in a New York court for this Tuesday (19th).

✖ Richard Perkins, the former Nevada politician and current PokerStars lobbyist, claims the push to pass the PokerStars-sponsored intrastate poker legislation AB 258 will soldier on despite the day’s events, as the bill “is not just about this company, it is about the policy of this state.”

✖ The Poker Players Alliance released a statement saying, in part, they were “shocked” by the DoJ’s actions. The PPA was good enough to note that “online poker is not a crime” but that’s not exactly what the DoJ is alleging here.

✖ Former Intabill head Daniel Tzvetkoff – who handled hundreds of millions for PokerStars, Full Tilt and others, plus allegedly funneling millions more into his own pockets — is being fingered as the canary singing loudest into DoJ ears. (Australia’s Courier Mail has a feature detailing the payment processing boy-wonder/Icarus and his subsequent fall from grace.)

✖ The scope of the internal company emails the DoJ has in its possession appears formidable. Our current personal favorite is the Sept. 29, 2009 message in which John Campos, the SunFirst Bank vice-chairman arrested in Utah on Friday, refers to a lawyer warning Campos of the risks involved in processing online gambling payments as a “wet blanket.”

✖ Among the details revealed in the emails is the wide variety of e-commerce websites used by the poker sites to handle transactions, including sites purporting to sell flowers, pet supplies, golf clubs, bicycles, clothing and/or jewelry. There was also a Green2YourGreen site that claimed to be a “direct sales” business in which consumers purchased enviro-friendly household products for resale to other customers in return for commissions. The site allegedly went as far as to include bogus ‘testimonials’ from satisfied customers re the green products. A DoJ sting apparently had two gamblers send queries to these phony co’s customer service re the charges that appeared on their bank statements, only to receive replies sent from PokerStars’ customer service.

✖ Worse, these emails directly indicate the poker companies’ complicity in these schemes, with PokerStars documents admitting that they were employing company names that “strongly imply the transaction has nothing to do with PokerStars” and that they used whatever names “the processor can get approved by the bank.”

✖ Is anyone buying the DoJ claim that these poker companies took in “one-third or more of the funds deposited by gamblers” via the rake? Makes the French regulated market look positively generous.

✖ It remains to be seen how foreign governments will react to the DoJ’s call for arrests of the indicted figures living outside the US, and for assets abroad to be seized.

✖ Finally, a big thumbs-down to FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Janice K. Fedarcyk, who decided to pepper her statement to the press with poker-related terminology. To wit: “These defendants … tried to stack the deck. They … bet the house that they could continue their scheme, and they lost.” Epic humor fail, Jan

34.b (from the indictment)

On or About January 20, 2009, Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker each recieved an electronic transfer of funds from a gambler located in the Southern District of New York.

COME FORWARD YOU SCUMBAG!!!

I'm using Firefox and quad jacks works for me : http://www.ustream.tv/channel/quadjacks-black-friday

Jungleman is coming there!

currently 157,645 players on stars, normally ~200K

Doesn't seem like too big a deal.

rake made will drastically decrease. Cashouts increase. Tournaments run under break-even, thus paying out at a loss. Any business operating like this will surely close-down. To make matters worse, things are very complicated and messy, that people outside of states are also afraid, causing a domino effect.

But like i mentioned earlier, its really hard to see where this will lead to, cuz its all so messy atm.

A sick ironic part of this: Apparently US players can still play cash at Absolue poker. LOL

PokerStars have no "Team PokerStars Players"

Well done, sir.

Stars/FTP will not close down because they are operating at a loss temporary because of this mess lol u mad?
Stars/FTP will only close down if it somehow gets seized or it goes bankrupt.