The recovery process from the freezing of Full Tilt Poker player funds nearly four and a half years ago continues. Though millions of dollars have been paid out to former U.S. customers of Full Tilt, there are still millions left to go. You thought it was all over, didn’t you?
On Friday, the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) announced that another wave of payments is on its way. Specifically, PPA Executive Director John Pappas posted an update on the “PPA Players Repayment Resource Center” of the PPA’s website that he has heard from his contact at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section that another several million dollars is set to be repaid. Nothing official has come from the DoJ or the Full Tilt Claims Administrator, the Garden City Group (GCG), but if Pappas is confident to make the announcement, the news is almost certainly true. As the loss of money from Black Friday is a painful subject to many former Full Tilt players, it is highly unlikely that Pappas would post something so hopeful based solely on speculation.
Below is the entire message John Pappas posted on the PPA’s website:
Update
I just spoke with my contact at DOJ AFMLS and learned that another batch is ready to be issued, but it could still be a few weeks till it hits player bank accounts. This next wave includes roughly 2,000 petitioners totaling $5.7M in funds. These are petitioners with disputed funds, those with missing info and those who they consider “new petitioners” (e.g. did not file with valid log-in credentials).
The remission has been approved. They expect about 1-2 weeks to transfer the money to GCG, then GCG will do its bank testing and finally, the money will arrive.
My contact says this leaves about 3,800 petitions unresolved. Most of them are “new petitioners” and there are some others, including pro-players, who are mixed into that bunch. There was no timeline provided for those final petitions, but the expectation was that they could all be done at once.
That is all the info I have for now. Be checking fulltiltpokerclaims.com for their official updates.
John A. Pappas
Poker Players Alliance
If the dollar amount Pappas relayed is accurate, around $109 million will have been paid out to U.S. players since the first payment wave started in February 2014. And while that sounds fantastic, there are two problems with that. First, it still doesn’t cover everyone who is owed money; not everyone will have been made whole. Now, that isn’t necessarily the fault of the GCG, the DoJ, or even Full Tilt’s records, as some players may have simply not completed the claims process or gone about it correctly, but it is still unfortunate. Second, the settlement PokerStars agreed to with the DoJ in which the poker room took control of Full Tilt and agreed to pay back its customers set aside $184 million for U.S. player refunds. Doing the math, that leaves $75 million still to be repaid. It is a virtual certainty that the majority of that will end up in the coffers of the GCG and the U.S. government.
