Apparently, the sky just fell...
 

FT, Stars, and Absolute seized by the FBI and owners indicted by the DOJ.

FML.

Live updates:


2p2 custerfuck:

Yea been reading about this the past 2 hours... wow insane

Any knowledge as to if $$$$ in the accounts will be tied up a long time or what to do?

Its dicey !!!! I was one month into a deal with UB and this is/was going to be my first wsop wearing their patch . I hope it stays in tact. This blows !!!

Aren't you the one who was telling me how shady UB is and that I should take their link off the home page of TP.com? :rolleyes:

This is the worse day in online poker history... worse than Neteller freezing, worse than Party pulling out, etc.

The best updates seem to be coming from here:

I haven't read anything other than a two paragraph article from god knows where, but maybe this could be a good thing. Hit rock bottom....and then the US gets in the market, comes back with bells and whistles, and we have fish again instead of grinding for rakeback and breakeven poker? MAYBE? I'm reaching here.

No i said you should take off that naked poker !!! Anyways I just talked to Seebs and were still good for the wsop. This blows . All our cash is locked!!

Is "forever" a long time to you? I wouldn't plan on seeing any $$$ if you have it on these sites.

Just clearing my points today and theres still 90k players on tilt and 180k on stars.

Tried to register for the $10 HORSE on 'Stars. Got a message saying you can't play real money tourneys from my location.

However, I can play cash games on 'Tilt

FYI - follow radleybalko of Reason magazine on Twitter. He's tweeting almost nonstop on this idiocy.

one tweet directed me to this:



Ah, isn't the hypocrisy of government beautiful!

Hey, on Monday, we can all show them what we think. DONT PAY YOUR TAXES!!!

got these links from Pauly, at

This is disastrous. I wonder how many sites will collapse due to a bank run.

orly?



Congrats on the UB sponsorship.

I would be pretty surprised if this were the case, TBH. I don't think stealing billions of dollars for U.S. citizens would be a very smart move for the DOJ.

I'm thinking it will be tied up for a long time and then paid out, kind of like the Neteller situation.

Of course, for those of us with a lot of cash staked out, recouping that money is going to be a lot more difficult. ie, if a check gets mailed to Horse X, and it's his only money in the world and he has no poker job any more, I think it's going to be mighty tempting for him to keep the money than to write me a check and mail it to me.

Hopefully everything works out for the best. It's kind of out of our control right now, so I'm trying not to beat myself up about it too much.

hey though, it is bring out the traffic to this site, with 2+2 being down and all.......

Wow.. so much for all that "progress" from last month:

I wonder if Stars will allow you to play out of the country. If you could....then you could just take a trip to Canada/Mexico and grind out enough to get your next milestone+fpp bonus.

Yeah, I was wondering about this myself...

The rumors are just flying around right now like mad - don't really know what to believe.

I converted all my FT Iron Man medals to tourney tickets (almost $4k worth), thinking it is more likely those will get paid out (if anything does) than the medals themselves. Other than that though, I'm not sure what all can be done on an individual basis, other than contacting Congressmen and pushing for legalized/regulated online poker, obv.

They targeted only the biggest sites. Do you think sites like Cake Poker will see an increase in traffic and they will accomodate or will they puss out?

I just deposited $25 on Cake with my visa debit card no problem.

Did anyone try to take money out today from PokerStars ?

Any non US players interested in a small 'Stars -> Cake swap?

I got a call from Stars this morning.

I talked to one of their VIP Managers for a good 10 minutes, and he was very friendly and sympathetic, but also a but uncomfortable - at least that was my read.

He did his best to answer all of my questions, but there are obviously a lot of unknowns. According to him though:

-Money is safe
-Stars will continue to operate outside the USA
-No timelines
-He suspects VPPs/FPPs will be prorated based on their value
-He noted my concerns aout money transfers to/from staked players
-I can't just fly to Canada for the weekend and play from a non-USA IP address... I need to establish residency with an ID (I think) and definitely a utility bill of some sort

Pretty much everything I expected, but I was still glad they called.

kinda knew this was coming, maybe not to this degree but something like this.

A friend of mine put on a good chunk of money a while back, like a couple months ago. He ended up going on a bad run and lost his deposit, he went and checked his bank account like a month later and noticed that they did not take the money out of his account. He emailed them and they said they were having issues and would take it out, needless to say 2 months later they still had not taken the money. After 3 months he closed the account and opened a new one because he didnt want to forget the money was there and accidently spend it then have them take it out and overdraw his account.

Their processors have been pulling away from them for months it seems.

Can't even get the FT client to launch... says there's a software update and then a pop-up says can't download update try again later. Fuck.

you have to go to to download a new update. can't play obviously but you can look at all those ftp points you got now!

I actually haven't closed my client since all this happened and can actually still register for tourneys.

I may be playing a Sunday schedule with FTOPS today...

Duh, I should've thought of that. They have to do a software update to block US players, but when updates are done, you're not forced to install the update until the next time you open the client.

Good job!!

Interesting difference between the sites.

On 'Tilt, I can play a FTP freeroll with real money prizes. On 'Stars, I can't. So much for GOYL.

then you come home and the dog is so excited to see you that it accidently runs over your powercord to your computer and knocks it out.....damn dog.

I have money on Cake but is it worth even playing there right now with the possibility of them being shut down next and funds being frozen there? I am not sure how long all this will last or cashouts being stopped some I am just curious on how this is going to work. I have good bit on Cake too, I may just try to cash it out right now and see how long it takes to get. Its crazy how quick all this happened and why now of all things?? Well good luck to everyone getting their funds off who has some tied uip in these sites. TP, I truely feel for you after you busted your butts the last 4 months on your Supernove Elite quest, maybe something will get worked out for you!

How did it go? I railed you for a while early on. Didn't think you had that much gamble in you - the AK triple-up hand. ;)

If you know and trust someone with a non USA account maybe you could transfer funds to their account and have them cash it for you?

No offence, but this isn't really a reasonable request right now, given the likelihood that Stars cashouts get frozen and/or international transfers get reversed.

My concern is the following:

1. The allegations against the sites are immense. The allegation of fraud and bribery appear to be substantiated. Defending the claim will be extremely expensive, if not impossible. The DoJ are going after the sites for billions of dollars, and I don't see how they get out of this cheaply.

2. You have to wonder how much money the sites have lying around on top of player balances to fund the lawsuit. The sites have been aware of the prospect of being pursued by the US Government for years (some of them borderline paranoid), and no doubt they have been salting away all the profits and scheming of ways to protect their assets from the inevitable.

3. See the stock price of BWIN/Party Poker (who pulled out of the market years ago) . It crashed by 30 - 40% following the news. If Party crashed by 30%, how much did Full Tilt's value decline by?

Amazing: "To begin with, the defendants employed“fraudulent credit card processing,” in two specific ways.

The first method was by creating phony companies (flower shops, pet stores, etc.) that would initiate the credit card charges. (The indictment specifies that Full Tilt and Absolute employed this method). Becuse the credit card companies usually caught on after a while, the defendants relied on a supply of stand-by phone merchants (twenty or more).

The second method (by each company) was to use pre-paid cards (including phone cards). They would load those cards with funds from the gamblers, without using the necessary code. They even created fake web sites and reviews of the cards, to make it appear that the cards had other legit purposes."

SJ,

Thanks for the link. Very interesting read.

And, if anyone is interested, here's a link to a copy of the complaint as filed in the U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York):

After April 15th, party/bwin stock went from 130 to a high of 180 (closing at 170). The stock would have been more interesting to see if the news broke before the London stock exchange closed on Friday.

Just look on the bright side.....

It went ok... I cashed 4 of 9 tourneys or something, but I didn't get deep into anything. I basically converted like $900 of tourney tickets to like $600 of cash money. Who know if they will be values the same or not when it comes time to closing accounts and (hopefully) distributing finds. Now I'm extra glad that I had previously spent some of my FTP points on two ipod touches, a Canon camera, a Sony LCD TV, and my Herman Miller Aeron chair, rather than saving them up for potentially nothing.

Unfortunately, a little popup appeared yesterday forcing me to update/restart and I haven't been able to log in since. I can't even get the update to run.

Transfers were frozen almost immediately.

Some potentially good news:

Tweet from Norman Chad yesterday:

Quite a sight: Mexicans crossing border illegally with entire families, Americans crossing border illegally with hand histories.

Maybe more good news
 

From the Forbes yesterday

LOL so it turns out that the likely narc is a guy from my city of Brisbane -- see and . I vaguely remember him being sued here in Australia by Pokerstars (), but I can't find the court documents.

My Brisbane poker friends predicted that he would eventually go to jail.

This should definitely be a movie

So the U.S. government is saying that they never froze any funds and that the sites are free to "refund" money back to U.S. players yet FT won't let me withdraw funds... hmmm.