If I recall, when Pokerstars was shut down, they almost immediately sent balances back to the players, with no jumping thru hoops, showing bank acct statements from 5 yrs ago, not claiming you didn't receive your requested withdraws. I guess this is the difference between running a Ponzi scheme/criminal operation with no intent on paying back monies owed, vs a realistic business model, run by non-criminals.

So what is the story about this phantom money/deposits?
Does this mean you could deposit to FullTilt, the transaction would be declined by the bank but somehow the money would "arrive" in your FT account and then you could play with it? Seems weird

All true enough , but I was simply saying that the remission process just seemed to miss some folks who just did not understand that there was something that they could do to claim their balances. Happens all the time. Some folks just miss out for various reasons.

From what I recently read the phantom deposits were taking place for the last 1/4 to a 1/3 of the year before black friday. Some players knew what was happening and took advantage of the situation, others were just trying to get money on the site to gamble.

And yeah, it's obvious, unless you do it pokerstars way of immediately paying it to all of the bank accounts, bringing a remissions process in to pay everyone will leave tons of people without money. The person or group that keeps the money is the payment processor. Not saying they have a reason to keep the payouts as small as possible, but...(..................)

total conjecture, just for fun, I am guessing that 15-30 percent of money owed was not paid. Grain of salt, etc., or pound of salt, lol. Thats like 40-100 mill depending on what numbers you use right? Remember I wrote above the reasons why someone might not get money back.

My guess is that the transactions were not processed at all, so no declines ....no processor available .... just floated into player accounts...., but who knows .... it likely put off an immediate collapse, Without Black Friday, they may have been able to eat the losses until they got processing back....

It kept them from having to shut the doors immediately, even though that would have been appropriate.