Good News for US Full Tilt Poker Affiliates on Commingled Player Accounts
Former US-based affiliates of Full Tilt Poker who were also one-time players on the site received good news on Friday when Garden City Group, the claims administrator for the United States-based remissions process, announced that affiliates will no longer be declared automatically ineligible for refunds.
Public outcry from the poker world arose when former affiliates were added in a blanket manner to the “ineligible” group, which also included such categories as former owners, site spokesman and business entities affiliated with the old Full Tilt, which was shuttered following Black Friday, leaving a nine-digit unpaid debt to its players.
Affiliates had previously been declared ineligible under the “business relationship” aspect of the ruling against Full Tilt and the settlement with third party PokerStars that allowed the old debts to be repaid. However, Garden City Group and the Department of Justice, which actually oversees the process and dictates the terms under which the refunds are made, appears to have not fully grasped the nature of commingling done by Full Tilt in regards to its former affiliates, in which affiliate payments were invariably dumped into standard player accounts along with regular poker funds.
Since the players and affiliates themselves had no choice in the matter, all funds were originally and technically at risk until Garden City Group announced the changes this week. This latest update and clarification can be found at the GCG-operated site for Full Tilt remissions, FullTiltPokerClaims.com, which is where applications for refunds continue to be submitted:
NOTICE TO AFFILIATES OF FULL TILT POKER
It has been determined that Affiliates of Full Tilt Poker (“FTP”) will be able to submit Petitions for Remission to recover the portion of their account balances that does not relate to their Affiliate status. Affiliate accounts have been flagged as such because the player signed up with FTP as an Affiliate. If you are an Affiliate, you will be able to submit a Petition for the portion of your account balance that relates to poker transactions, as long as you meet the eligibility criteria. GCG is in the process of receiving updated data from FTP concerning Affiliates’ accounts.
Once GCG receives and completes its review of the data, we will email all Affiliates of record to provide instructions for the Petition process and provide login credentials for online filing. You will then have 30 days to submit a Petition. The filing process for Affiliates will not delay the processing or payment of other Petitions for Remission.
Please note that the FAQs were recently updated with additional information. Please click here to view the FAQs.
The change, however just, is unlikely to impact in a major way the bottom line of funds returned to players, nor will the incremental increase in players declared as eligible likely cause the total to be returned to exceed that planned for via the DOJ/Stars settlement, a figure maxed out at roughly $150 million. (Stars also returned an additional $184 million to Full Tilt’s former international players.) Major US-based affiliates who had amassed hundreds or thousands of signups to Full Tilt will still find the payments generated from those signups to be declared ineligible, once GCG “completes its review,” as noted above.
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