There are thousands of you out there in the interwebaverse who get tucked into bed every night, cozy and content in the knowledge the Full Tilt funds you once had frozen after Black Friday are now safe and sound in your bank account (until an international hacking syndicate takes down the U.S. banking system, resulting in, we’ll say Denzel Washington, working tirelessly to track the shadowy leader down). Believe it or not, almost five years after Black Friday, there are still former U.S. customer of Full Tilt that have yet to receive their money. But as Professor Farnsworth would say, “Good news everyone!” Another round of payments will be coming soon.
Full Tilt claims administrator Garden City Group (GCG) announced on Friday (via FullTiltPokerClaims.com) that the eighth wave of payments has been approved. Once the payments are made, 94 percent of former U.S. customers of Full Tilt will have received their money.
The entire message from GCG is 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, this distribution includes payments to approximately 1,180 Petitions totaling approximately $2.6 million.
GCG has completed its initial review of all filed Petitions and, with this round of payments, we will have paid approximately 94% of those filed. GCG continues to work with the Department of Justice (the “DOJ”) to evaluate the remaining Petitions. 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. Responses to these emails are 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.
Counting this wave of payments, more than 44,000 players will have been paid back in the United States, receiving money totaling almost $112 million.
One of the trickiest parts of the account reviews for Garden City Group right now is to sort out business revenue from poker revenue. Originally, players who received funds into their accounts because of business relationship with Full Tilt, such as Full Tilt sponsored pros or Full Tilt affiliates, were excluded from the remissions process. After rethinking the situation, thanks largely to discussions with the Poker Players Alliance, those players were allowed to be refunded, but only for money derived from poker player, not from affiliate businesses or sponsorship deals. It appears that GCG is still having trouble in some instances sorting out what deposits are eligible for refunds – coming from actual poker play – and which are not.