Poker players in the US that have been expecting to get their long overdue reimbursements from Full Tilt Poker should probably sit tight and wait a little longer because it looks like a resolution to that year’s old issue is no closer to getting resolved anytime soon.
According to Bob Pajich of CardPlayer, the Garden City Group, the organization that has the responsibility of handling the reimbursements have yet to move past identifying player information obtained from the U.S. Department of Justice. With no progress still being made in that front, a sourced told Pajich that significant steps forward regarding the whole reimbursement issue could still take more than two years before players who lost their funds almost two years ago can get their money back. In that case, that would be around 2015, which is still a long ways away.
Player identification is just one problem, though. There are a myriad of different issues that still need to be worked, not the least of which includes determining which players get settlements and how much these players stand to get. Garden City Group is working through two government agencies – the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section of the Department of Justice and the Asset Forfeiture Unit of the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York – in trying to determine a resolution on this problem. It’s more than likely that a lot of the players who lost their money when Full Tilt closed down in September 2011 won’t be getting their full lost shares back. It’s been an estimated that the full reimbursement amount has been pegged at $184 million, which clearly won’t be enough for the 1.3 million or so players that are in line to get a piece of that pie.
And then there’s the issue of getting the issue moving when it hits the courts. Pajich notes that even if Garden City Group gets the federal green light allowing the company all the information it needs to do its job of handling all the reimbursements to FTP players, Garden City Group still needs to go through the proper channels (in this case, the courts) before it can actually begin the whole process of giving the money back to all the players who lost it.
So if you happen to be sitting on your desk and waiting for your FTP funds to be returned to you, you’re more than likely going to sit a whole lot longer than you’d want. If you want to expedite the process a little bit in your favor, you can register at fulltiltpokerclaims.com and wait for Garden City Group to contact you regarding the next steps that need to be taken before the reimbursement returns to your account.
