Absolute Poker Remission Claims Deadline Extended Until September
Add another 90 days to the period of time that former players on failed sites Absolute Poker and UB.com (formerly UltimateBet) will have to file an application for remission (a refund of an owed balance) for long-abandoned balances on those sites.
Without announcing the reason, Department of Justice-appointed claims administrator Garden City Group has quietly pushed back the deadline to file, from June 9, 2017 — today! — to September 7, 2017. The updated deadline, along with other information that any global customer of AP or UB needs to file, can be found at AbsolutePokerClaims.com.
This deadline extension can be viewed as a good news / bad news development for former players on the two sites. One possible explanation for the extension ordered this week by the DOJ is that the notification method used to ID and contact former AP and UB players was simply inadequate. It’s been over six years since the two sites closed up shop in the wake of 2011’s “Black Friday” charges targeting the two sites and others. Six years is an eternity in online terms; e-mail address change or are abandoned, people move in real life and invalidate other means of contact, and to a certain extent, it’s tough to get the word out in full.
People move on. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence in the form of social-media and forum posters that one-time customers of the two sites have a chance to get money back. (We still don’t know if it will be all lost money, or just some.)
Extending the deadline to apply for a refund by another three months will turn out to be great news for many players, some of whom might even have moved out of the sphere of awareness of online-poker matters.
But there’s a tradeoff. It means that the nitty-gritty work, the process of confirming eligible balances and readying accounts for refunds, won’t move past the initial stages for that same three months. It’ll like work out that the first approved wave of AP/UB payments will be sent out three months later than might otherwise have happened.
Other issues also need to be addressed before payments can be sent out, most notably the submission and verification of banking information for eligible applicant. GCG changed its approach somewhat from the process it first used in the handling of Full Tilt Poker refunds. Try #2 appears more streamlined, but the whole “Where will you send my money?” question has been pushed back for now.
Current AP/ UB refund applicants have verified both the deadline extension and the fact that current bank info is still not needed. Many players have reported contacting GCG in recent days about the updates, and have received responses such as this:
The extension to file was ordered by the Department of Justice however this will not delay the review process. We will be reviewing Petitions on a rolling basis.
At this time we do not have a distribution date available. You can check back in about 4 to 5 weeks to see if we have any updated information on when the payments will be going out.
The payments will be made electronically (ACH); once the petitions are approved we will contact you for your banking information.
We’ll update with more on the Absolute Poker / UltimateBet (UB/com) remission story as it develops.
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