Valentine’s Day may be coming early for Full Tilt Poker’s former American players via claims that the remission of their long-frozen account balances may finally be in the works. On Wednesday, Poker Players Alliance exec director John Pappas took to the 2+2 forums to announce that the US Department of Justice had completed its audit of the petitions received by the FTP claims administrator Garden City Group (GCG) and had approved “approximately 30,000 undisputed player claims totaling approx $82m in remissions” (emphasis in the original).
There’s yet to be an official announcement via GCG’s designated go-to website, fulltiltpokerclaims.com, but this was expected within 24 hours. Pappas said the DOJ didn’t offer a timeline on when email notifications would be sent to these lucky 30k players but guesstimated it would be in advance of the previously stated March 31 deadline. That would make it just under one year since the DOJ appointed GCG to administer the FTP claims and nearly three years since those funds vanished after the DOJ indicted FTP and froze its bank accounts – which turned out not to have any money in them – on Black Friday.
Online poker titan PokerStars refunded the deposits of FTP’s players outside the US in August 2012 as part of its $731m acquisition of FTP’s assets and the settlement of Stars’ Black Friday civil charges. As part of that deal, Stars also provided sufficient funds to refund FTP’s US player deposits – estimated at around $150m – but it has taken this long for the wheels of bureaucracy to sort through the claims.
Pappas cautioned that some of the 30k undisputed claims would require further back and forth with GCG to resolve incomplete or incorrect applications. The question of whether FTP’s former affiliates and sponsored pros would receive any monies they believe themselves to be owed “is still unresolved.” The DOJ also offered no specifics on when a reckoning of disputed claims might be forthcoming, but Pappas claimed to be “very impressed that the DOJ worked through these issues and shared the info with the PPA.”
