While several litigations against Full Tilt Poker appear to be resolved or dead in the water, the online poker room is still not in the clear when it comes to a lawsuit accusing the site of unfairly seizing player funds, using bots on the site, and racketeering.
Poker News Daily first reported the story of Lary “pokergirl z” Kennedy in early October. The gist of her rather complicated case is that Kennedy was accused of using a bot by another player on the site who was also a frequent poster in the TwoPlusTwo poker forum. As a result of those accusations and Kennedy’s own admittance that she used another player’s account when her own screen name wasn’t eliciting enough action, the site seized the funds in her account, which amounted to just over $80,000.
After a long period of communication with Full Tilt, Kennedy decided that her best course of action was to file suit against not only the company, but also several individuals involved with Full Tilt, including Raymond Bitar, Howard Lederer, Andy Bloch, John Juanda, Chris Ferguson, Perry Friedman, and Patrik Antonius, just to name a few. While the crux of the complaint centers on Kennedy’s alleged mistreatment by the site, it also levels numerous charges against two companies involved with Full Tilt, Vert Enterprises and Tiltware. The charges in the suit include fraud, libel, slander, false advertising, and somewhat surprisingly, racketeering.
The invocation of the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act stemmed from what Kennedy and co-plaintiff Greg Omotoy claimed were hundreds of illegal gambling transactions. While most typically associate the RICO Act with mobsters and gangs, it is actually common when it comes to civil suits, as those affected by RICO are able to receive three times the amount of damages they would otherwise have gotten.
Nonetheless, the accusations, which include claims that Ferguson and Bloch created and implemented bots used on the Full Tilt site, has raised a few eyebrows regarding its legal merit. Full Tilt, which is notorious for keeping mum in legal situations, spoke out against the suit, calling it “baseless” and “frivolous.”
Kennedy’s official website documenting the case shows no new information as of late and most of the attention following the announcement of the suit has been directed at her counsel, Cyrus Sanai. The UCLA Law School graduate has been in the news before for another internet-related matter, a case involving California Judge Alex Kosinski. In mid-2008, Sanai uncovered a number of lewd photographs on the sub-directory of a personal website belonging to Kosinski and filed a disciplinary complaint against the judge, who was in the midst of a high-profile pornography trial. Some legal blogs like Overlawyered and Patterico have suggested that Sanai has a less-than-stellar reputation in some corners of the California legal community.
When Pokerati posted a story chronicling some of Sanai’s actions over the past couple of years, a commenter purporting to be Sanai posted rebuttals to the criticisms and directed the focus back to the case itself. The comments stated that he tried repeatedly to resolve the matter with Full Tilt representatives and even sat down for a mediation session that failed to produce any results. Within the comments, Sanai also expressed interest in learning more about other cases in which the site seized customer funds.
These sentiments are echoed on Kennedy’s personal site as well, which encourages anyone with a similar story to contact Sanai, who would consider taking on new clients on a contingency basis.
