1) They filed a civil suit. Ponzi schemes are criminal.

2) They had several hundred million seized domestically, and the Feds pressured overseas banks to freeze their accounts as well.

However, taking deposits without being able to get the money from depositors was incredibly dumb. Criminal? I don’t agree.

But would they have had any problems without the DOJ? I don’t think that’s clear.

Thanks for the clarification.

Your timeline is a little off. Full Tilt didn’t just start pretending to process deposits after “the feds brought down the hammer” on 4/15/11. This process (of crediting players’ accounts with money that was never received) began more than a year ago, when US banks started blocking most Americans’ deposits to Full Tilt. By the time Full Tilt cut off access to American players on 4/15 in response to the US government’s actions, the discrepancy had reached over $100 million.

The allegations of fraud are described in Doug’s post (#7). The regulations under which Full Tilt operated in Ireland required them to separate player accounts from operating expenses. Full Tilt continued to assert that these accounts were kept separate until well after 4/15, but it appears that this was almost certainly a lie, and that the accounts were illegally mixed since at least 3 or 4 years ago. Full Tilt simply paid their top executives 8-figure salaries directly out of the money that was legally required to be kept in segregated player accounts. Their executives — including your friends Mr. Lederer and Mr. Ferguson — should forfeit their assets and go to jail based on this alone.

You and Gillespie are the only ones I see claiming Jesus was indicted.

The calculus is a bit different when people make bad decisions because the good decisions are illegal.

Hack, you think the government is going to learn its lesson? Its been 40 years on the War on Drugs and they ain’t letting that one die without a fight. It’s not about effectiveness, or whether or not they have the right to do this thing, or even if there is money in it (which there is, the brick and mortar casino’s went through a lot of trouble to try and kill the online competition). Our government has fully absorbed the imperial mindset. Everything they do is right and just, not based on some external set of morals, but based entirely on whether or not the government decides to do them.

Re-legalizing online poker would be admitting that it was a mistake to make it illegal in the first place. That by itself means there’s next to no chance of it getting legalized. You can’t do this kind of thing honestly anymore, no one talks about who is hurt by a law or if the law is even necessary in the first place. The only way online poker is coming back is if some clever senator shoves a rider onto some Homeland Defense Bill in the middle of the night, and no one bothers to read it in the morning. You know the exact same laughably crooked way it was made illegal in the first place.

*OFFTOPIC*
I used to use the moniker “random_guy” or “random guy” but there seems to be a few people with very similar names going around so I’m switching up.

We shouldn’t protect people from making their own bad decisions.

If the U.S. government takes the clue, then hopefully in the near future we will have legitimate, legal online poker available to us. Sure, it will be regulated and taxed, but as adults we will be able to take part in an adult activity without the fear of breaking the law.

Make it legal. Get oversight to protect the players and guarantee proper and non-onerous taxes are collected, and let us be. Does anybody think that Full Tilt could have co-mingled players’ deposits with operating funds if the equivalent of the Nevada Gaming Commission was watching over their shoulders? (Please ignore the banking fiasco of the past few years when answering that.)

*I do not mean to pull a Godwin with that “moral fascists” phrase. But just because I did not mean to do it does not mean I didn’t….