PPA Letter to Lock Poker Demanding Player Repayment
To: The Owners, Officers, and Managers of Lock Poker
Re: Status of poker player requests for return of funds.
On behalf of the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), we, the undersigned members of the PPA Board of Directors, are writing regarding the current payment processing situation at Lock Poker. We will gladly report to our membership any information you can provide.
The reason we are contacting you with this formality is due to the substantial number of complaints we have received from Lock Poker players. We have been informed that Lock Poker is taking an unreasonable time in fulfilling its customers? requests for return of their funds. In some cases, the reports are of significant delays; in others, we see reports of requests for payment having languished over a year with no progress. Similarly, many players report that Lock Poker frequently responds to their inquiries about the status of their funds with canned emails or emails that simply state the request is "still in processing."
The Lock Poker website has no mention of these significant delays. To the contrary, as of today Lock Poker support is telling potential new depositors that withdrawal requests take eight to ten weeks to process, with some experiencing longer withdrawal times. While this may be a marginal improvement over recent reports from potential new depositors of promised withdrawals in four to six weeks, it clearly falls far short in warning new depositors of the significant cashout situation at Lock Poker.
As America's leading advocate for the political and legal rights of US Poker Players, PPA is well aware of the difficulties inherent in transferring money to and from poker players in the US. We are also aware of, and totally committed to, the principle that protection and availability of player funds is essential for a properly functioning poker economy. In accord with this, PPA keeps its members informed of problems concerning player funds held on account at poker sites and works as aggressively as possible to protect and/or facilitate return of those player funds when poker businesses have failed to do so.
With respect to Lock Poker specifically, the uneven nature of your processing of player requests for return of their funds raises questions. All players seem aware of the difficult nature of the times and expect some delay in processing payments, but players do not understand why some players are occasionally paid within or near the stated time frame while others wait additional months and others seem to never get paid. Equally perplexing are the many reports that players are getting little or no information regarding why such a state of affairs exists. As we are sure you are aware, many players are directly questioning the financial solvency of Lock Poker and its ability to repay players. Many have begun to sell their funds on Lock Poker on the secondary market for substantially less than the face value.
The undersigned Board Members have discussed simply issuing direct warnings to all our members concerning the Lock Poker situation, but before deciding whether to take such action it was agreed that Lock Poker should first be offered the opportunity to communicate its policies and situation. We would like to begin that dialogue with responses to the following questions:
1. Does Lock Poker keep players? funds segregated from operating funds? If so, what mechanism is used to accomplish this separation?
2. Does Lock Poker have, or will it be implementing, a system to organize its payment processing so that those who have been waiting the longest will be given priority in future payments?
3. Does Lock Poker have a timeline of its plan to pay its players in full?
4. Will Lock Poker immediately provide open, accurate, up-to-date information regarding time required to process customer withdrawal requests?
We appreciate that there may be legal difficulties in processing payments to US players, but we cannot ignore a situation where the funds of a substantial portion of the poker community may be in jeopardy.
We look forward to your response to our inquiry.
Sincerely,
John Pappas, PPA Executive Director
Rich Muny, PPA VP of Player Relations
Patrick W. Fleming, PPA Litigation Support Director
Find an interesting discussion about it here, some people jumping all over the PPA for being late to the party...
PPA Letter to Lock Poker Demanding Player Repayment - Poker News - News, Views and Gossip
