The unnecessarily long, stupid saga of Lock Poker has come to an inglorious end. While the online poker site has not issued any sort of formal statement (and we would expect nothing less), it appears that it has shut its doors for good.
According to USPoker’s John Mehaffey, Lock Poker has been down since the morning of April 17th. The website works just fine and the poker client software is able to be downloaded, but it will not connect to a server. Additionally, customer support appears to have completely disappeared, as live chat is offline and e-mails are not being returned. The shell form used to create a new account is still there, but nothing happens when new account information is submitted (and this is a good thing).
It is a similar situation with Lock Casino. The website loads, but it is impossible to logon with the software.
On the one hand, it is a good thing for the poker world that Lock Poker seems to be gone. Since the disappearance of UltimateBet and Absolute Poker, Lock Poker has been the worst-run online poker site in the world with a criminal scam artist heading it all up. Those in charge do not deserve to make any money, so Lock’s whimpering, pathetic end is fitting. Nobody will miss the site.
The problem, though, is that this also means that now Lock Poker’s customers will have no chance at all to receive any of their funds. Nobody realistically thought they would ever see their money again, but as long as Lock Poker still existed, there was at least the notion that there could be a non-zero chance for players to be made whole.
Two Plus Two poster “IHasTehNutz” has been tracking player cashout requests in a dedicated thread on the poker forum. According to his information, voluntarily supplied by players, the last Lock Poker time a customer in the United States actually received money from the poker room was April 2nd, 2014. It has been since January 2014 that anyone outside the U.S. has received a check. Some outstanding cashout requests date back to November 2012.
It is estimated that Lock Poker is absconding with around $15 million in player deposits, nearly a $1 million which has already been requested to be withdraw by customers. It would be the largest theft of funds by a poker room or network since the Cereus Network (Absolute, UltimateBet) went up in a puff of smoke following Black Friday four years ago. Player losses in that case amounted to $45-$50 million, according to Mehaffey.
It is actually a bit surprising that it took this long for Lock Poker to die. Cashouts have been incredibly slow for years because of severe overspending by Lock management, but checks did get mailed every now and then, keeping hope alive in the hearts of players that things might be fine. There were enough players that either didn’t know about the problems or convinced themselves that sporadic successful cashouts were a good sign that Lock was still able to get players to deposit.
