The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is on the verge of appointing a claims administrator, whose job it will be to process the claims made by Full Tilt Poker’s former players in the US.
The official DoJ website displays an ad for this post, inviting interested candidates to apply for the post with all the required documents within August 31.
On April 15, 2011, the DoJ cracked down on three major online poker rooms—Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and PokerStars—seized their domain names and slapped charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling on 11 key people associated with these sites.
Shocked US poker players found that they could no longer gain access to their accounts and withdraw their money. While PokerStars was quick to reimburse its US players, Full Tilt Poker was simply not able to do so because it had badly mismanaged its finances and could not repay players. To make matters worse, Full Tilt Poker lost its licenses to operate in the international market, owing to which even non US players were unable to withdraw their funds. For the past 15 months, Full Tilt Poker players worldwide have been wondering if they will ever get back their money.
Recently, the US federal government signed a settlement deal with PokerStars, as a result of which PokerStars will acquire Full Tilt Poker and reimburse Full Tilt Poker’s non-US players. PokerStars will also pay a sum of $547 million to the US government in three installments over the next three years. The online poker giant has already paid the first installment and acquired Full Tilt Poker, and the DoJ intends to use this money to reimburse Full Tilt US Poker players.
Since the DoJ wants to start the claims process at the earliest possible, it has advertised for a “Claims Administrator – Full Tilt Poker,” who can “design and execute a process to solicit, receive, and evaluate claims, and to process payments, for losses incurred by US victims that are attributable to the fraud alleged in US v. PokerStars et al.” Besides providing proof of qualification and experience, applicants for this post are expected to report any contact they might have with the online gambling industry, which might hinder their ability to do justice to the claims. According to the DoJ, Full Tilt Poker owes a sum of around $159 million to around 1.3 million US poker players.
