More Full Tilt Remission Payments Returned to Former US Players

26th November 2015 // Industry, Misc, News

Another round of refund payments has arrived in the bank accounts of former US-based players of the original Full Tilt Poker, according to dozens of forum and social-media posts published within the last 48 hours. The latest round of remission payments fulfills advance notice of such a round issued roughly a month and a half ago by the designated claims administrator in the Full Tilt refund action, Garden City Group.

GCG first acknowledged this latest round of payments early in October, via offline communications with Poker Players Alliance executive director John Pappas. On October 3rd, Pappas wrote, in part, “This next wave includes roughly 2,000 petitioners totaling $5.7M in funds. These are petitioners with disputed funds, those with missing info and those who they consider “new petitioners” (e.g. did not file with valid log-in credentials).”

Two days later, Garden City Group, or GCG, officially confirmed this latest round, the seventh such to be issued by the DOJ-authorized administrator since early 2014. GCG only two days later confirmed Pappas’s information, even leaving out some of those specifics in an October 5th update that read as follows:

GCG has been informed that the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section has approved a new round of payments, which will include payments to Petitioners who confirmed their FTP Account Balances, Petitioners who have disputed their FTP Account Balances and Petitioners designated by Full Tilt as “Professionals.” In all, the distribution will include approximately 1,900 Petitions totaling approximately $5.5 million. After this round of payments, we will have paid approximately 92% of all Petitions filed.
GCG continues to work with the Department of Justice (the “DOJ”) to evaluate the balance of the Petitions that have been filed. Petitions that are found to be valid will be paid in upcoming distributions. For further information regarding the payment process and bank testing, please see the March 16, 2015 notice, which can be found on the Previous Updates tab.
Please note that GCG continues to send emails notifying Petitioners of deficiencies in their Petitions, including Petitioners who did not provide required documentation or provided insufficient documentation in support of their Petitions, including certain Petitioners who have disputed their FTP Account Balance. Please note that responses will be required within 20 days of the date of the email. Please be sure to check your email account’s spam or junk folder to ensure the message was not filtered.

Forums such as TwoPlusTwo and PocketFives were filled with enthusiastic confirmation of electronic bank deposits received by former US-based FTP-ers, each of whom in this latest round have waited nearly four and two-thirds years for their refunds. Though those refunds come without any interest payments on the duration, that’s probably still better than consumer experiences with other shuttered sites, which normally produced a couple pennies on the dollar for a remission settlement, or — even more often — nothing at all.

“Paid in full! I’m a happy boy,” reported “ratm2525, a typical 2+2 poster.

“Omg. Got paid in full today after 4 years, 7 months, 10 days. Weeee,” added ‘ig_rounder,” in a similar-themed post.

According to Pappas’s original notice, the completion of this seventh round of refunds will leave roughly 3,800 petitioners yet to be refunded, including what has been estimated to be several hundred high-balance accounts. This last 3,800 accounts includes so-called “new petitioners” along with those whose accounts needed individualized review, for any of several different reasons.

Full Tilt Poker, despite the slowness of this remission process, remains the exception to the normal rule of consumers getting the shaft once a site is closed for any reason. Only through the third-party efforts of PokerStars, which acquired the remaining assets of Full Tilt in exchange for refunding the original site’s US-based players, were Full Tilt’s original players refunded. FTP’s US base alone was owed a sum collectively well into nine digits, and FTP’s international player base was owed many tens of millions more. Stars has funded all of those refunds, and has since relaunched the site outside the US and has also slightly rebranded it, as Full Tilt Gaming.

The seven completed waves of US-facing Full Tilt refunds: