Full Tilt Poker or Full Tilt Ponzi?

According to the US Justice Department it’s the latter.

They’ve now filed a revised lawsuit against operators of Full Tilt alleging the company misused money from player accounts to fund board member payments, despite assurances those accounts were protected and wouldn’t be touched.

Preet Bharara from the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a press statement:

“Full Tilt was not a legitimate poker company, but a global Ponzi scheme. Not only did the firm orchestrate a massive fraud against the U.S. banking system, as previously alleged, Full Tilt also cheated and abused its own players to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Over a four year period more than $400 million was taken from player accounts to fund massive payments to board members including $41 million to Raymond Bitar, $42 million to Howard Lederer and $25 million of a promised $87.5 million to Christopher Ferguson.  As result, when the music stopped for Full Tilt back in April and the Feds shut down their sites, they owed players $390 million but only had $60 million left in player accounts from which to pay out.

Ouch!

If the allegations are true, Messrs Bitar, Lederer, Ferguson and the rest of the company’s board are NOT going to be very popular with the many thousands of poker players who are still out of pocket. I daresay they’ll want to join payment processing whiz kid turned Supergrass Daniel Tzvetkoff in hiding somewhere.

Until now the Feds have been the target of a good deal of player frustration in the belief that they were in some way impeding the payout process.