Full Tilt Poker, a popular online gaming website that used to offer gambling to millions of players worldwide, faced license revocation by gambling control commission last week accusing the site for misleading officials about its financial operations.
Andre Wilsenach, exe director of the Alderney commission, said in a statement on their official website that Full Tilt Poker reported seized or restrained balances by U.S. authorities as liquid funds, and have also been giving out unauthorized loans and failed to report material events for the same.
Sources reported Full Tilt saying in a press release that the license revocation makes it more difficult for them to execute any sales and repayment to their players. The company also said it is still committed to repaying players despite “the potential damage done by the commission and its disregard for our players.”
Jeff Ifrah, a lawyer based in Washington representing Full Tilt, avoided to immediately return messages seeking comments from The Associated Press. Ifrah was heard saying last week on a popular Web forum for poker players that an investor from France has signed a letter of intent showing enough funds to take over the besieged company and pay back its players. Moreover, Ifrah was found telling players on TwoPlusTwo dot com that the said deal with the investor from France would become “more difficult, if not impossible,” if Full Tilt’s license were revoked by the Commission.
U.S. prosecutors have accused Full Tilt Poker’s website of operating as “a global Ponzi scheme” by stripping player accounts and paying the company board members $444 million. These payments included transferring funds to well-known poker players, which includes about $25 million to 2000 World Series Poker champion Chris Ferguson known as “Jesus” and a hefty $42 million to Howard Lederer known as “The Professor” in the poker community.
Ian Imrich, a lawyer for Ferguson, said to AP last week that the site was not running any Ponzi schemes. Imrich said he was looking into possibilities of prosecutors misusing the term, thaumaturgy images of Bernie Madoff, a former stockbroker who had admitted to the largest Ponzi scheme in American history. “Use of the inflammatory term ‘Ponzi scheme’ in the post-Madoff era is more than careless and may violate pre-trial publicity rules of professional responsibility,” Imrich commented.
Struggling to come clean of all the accusations of conducting fraud and Ponzi Schemes, Full Tilt Poker has still been continuously promising their players that their accounts were protected and wouldn’t be touched.
Though mostly online gambling is technically illegal in the USA following a law passed in 2006 that prevents finance companies from processing any such transactions. But it seems a lot of people have been in a state of confusion and have called for the law to be precisely clarified to categorically define all the kinds of gambling that is legal or illegal.
“What wasn’t known to us is that the Department of Justice had frozen funds associated with the operation of Full Tilt,” said Andre Wilsenach, Chief Executive of the Alderney Gambling Control Commission, in response to comments from gambling attorneys and regulators at a major conference in Las Vegas, Nevada recently.”The funds we thought were cash was not cash and were not available to players or to the company.”
The gaming regulator has played a key role in the downfall of Full Tilt, which was known as one of the most popular online poker websites in the world until April 2011 when the government of the United States prosecuted executives at the company and other online gaming sites owned by them, alleging bank fraud and other charges on them.
Images Courtsey: www.fulltiltpoker.net
