More Full Tilt Poker Refunds Announced
Garden City Group, the court-appointed claims administrator in charge of processing Full Tilt Poker refunds to former US-based players of the site, has announced another smallish wave of refunds to be issued in the coming days. The latest round of refunds includes about 600 former Full Tilt players and a total of about $2 million, and will bring the total refunded to date to just under $100 million.
The complete text of the latest announcement from Ohio-based GCG is appended below.
Of special note is that this latest round of payments still does not remit payments to several special categories of players, for whom the FTP remission process drags on with no end in site. According to the latest announcement, this small wave of payments is again being sent to players who did not dispute their FTP balances as shown in the platform’s database when taken over by the US government. Instead, these are likely late-arriving remission applications or, as also comprised much of a refund wave issued in June, players whose banking information was incomplete or outdated. GCG has also noted that many players in this batch have preexisting debt to the United States in other matters — such as back tax liens, fines or unpaid child support — for which some or all of their payments may be used.
Still waiting for good news from Garden City Group are two large categories of players, those who disputed their listed balances, likely to never having received claimed cashouts during the last days of Full Tilt’s US-facing operations, and those players who had business relationships with the site and had their business payments and poker action intermingled in their accounts. The latter description applies to both former Full Tilt “Red Pros” and to some former affiliates of the site, both of whom ended up victimized by Full Tilt’s general practice of dumping payments directly into player accounts. That slack business practice has come back to bite many former Full Tilt-associated players, who have waited well over three years with no concrete end date in sight.
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INFORMATION NOTICE REGARDING UPCOMING PAYMENTS
GCG has been informed that the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section has approved a new round of payments. This distribution will include approximately 600 Petitions totaling $2 million submitted by Petitioners with complete Petitions, who confirmed their FTP Account Balances. GCG is currently working with the bank selected by the DOJ to set up the payment process. GCG expects to issue payments via ACH before the end of September 2014 and will post further updates on the payment process as they become available.
As part of the process of preparing this next round of payments, shortly before payments are issued, Petitioners who are approved to receive payment may notice a zero-dollar transaction in their bank account statement that relates to the Full Tilt Poker Claims Administration. Please be aware that this is a normal part of the bank testing process in preparation for payment of ACHs. However, not all banks post these notices during the testing process, so do not be concerned if you do not receive such a notice and believe you are eligible to receive payment in the upcoming distribution.
Please be advised that there are Petitioners who are eligible for payment in the upcoming round of payments, but who have a delinquent debt qualifying for collection through the Treasury Offset Program. Payments for these Petitioners will be reduced in order to satisfy their debt in part or in whole. A notice will be sent to these Petitioners in the upcoming weeks and will include a Unified Financial Management System Vendor Request Form, which must be completed by the Petitioner in order to receive the balance of his or her payment. Please note that Petitioners who were previously approved for payment and were notified that they had a delinquent debt qualifying for collection through the Treasury Offset Program, but who still have not returned a completed form will not receive payment until a completed form is submitted.
Please continue to check this website for updates regarding the payment process and this administration.
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