For those in the United States who received their Full Tilt funds that were frozen on Black Friday, it was a long wait to get them back. For most, the process was easy – it just required they login to their old Full Tilt accounts and verify the dollar amount – but still took a long time to actually see the money. For others, it was as laborious and painful as a complicated income tax return, requiring all sorts of documentation and proof before their petitions would be reviewed. The vast majority of former Full Tilt customers, fortunately, have been reimbursed to this point – more than five years after Black Friday – but it turns out that at least 1,500 will never receive their lost funds.
On Friday, the Garden City Group, the claims administrator assigned by the U.S. Department of Justice to handle the Full Tilt funds distribution, announced that 1,500 petitions for reimbursement have been denied. The announcement, found on the fulltiltpokerclaims.com website, was brief:
GCG has been informed that the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section has denied approximately 1,500 Petitions. Petitioners flagged for denial have been notified via email. Please be sure to check your email account’s spam or junk folder to ensure the message was not filtered. Denied petitioners have ten days to appeal the decision.
This announcement comes about two months after the GCG said that the eighth wave of payments to former U.S. Full Tilt players had been approved. That wave of payments covered about 1,180 players and $2.6 million.
To date, more than 44,000 players have been repaid in amounts totaling nearly $112 million. The GCG said that approximately 94 percent of players who filed petitions have now been paid back. It is estimated that the 1,500 denied claims equate to about half of the six percent of petitions that had not been paid.
It was not revealed why the petitions were denied, though it should not have been expected that the reasons would be made public. We should assume, of course, that these petitions were amongst the most complicated, or at least involved those that provided the weakest documentation.
Some of the more complicated petitions over the last few years involved sponsored pros or Full Tilt affiliates. These people often earned two types of income from the poker room: income from simply playing poker and income from business dealings with the site. They were originally prevented from submitting claims, but that was really because the GCG and DoJ did not understand the difference between business and poker income. The Poker Players Alliance stepped in, though, and worked with the GCG to clear things up. Poker pros and affiliates were eventually allowed to file claims, but only for missing funds derived from playing poker, not from business dealings with Full Tilt.
