Full Tilt Poker Accused of Running a Ponzi scheme
This was published 21-09-2011Dublinbased, Full Tilt Poker, has had a new court complaint lodged against it by one of the leading white collar crime prosecutors in theUS, Preet Bharara.
Bharara was involved in the prosecution of Bernie Madoff and Raj Rajaratnam and lodged the complaint against Full Tilt Poker in a US court claiming that the company had been operating a Ponzi scheme Dublin based online poker site, Full Tilt Poker, led by Howard Lederer and Ray Bitar and that Full Tilt Poker has been milking its own players’ money in order to benefit these two founders of the company.
The Manhattan Attorney also claimed that Full Tilt was not a legitimate poker company but was, in fact, a global Ponzi scheme and added “Not only did the firm orchestrate a massive fraud against the United States banking system, as previously alleged, but Full Tilt also cheated and abused its own players to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars”.
Bharara stated that the scheme was discovered after the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation took action against Full Tilt Poker as well as against Absolute Poker and Poker Stars earlier this year.
The Attorney also said “Full Tilt insiders lined their own pockets with funds picked from the pockets of their most loyal customers while blithely lying to both players and the public alike about the safety and security of the money deposited with the company.
Despite the fact that Full Tilt only has $60 million in its accounts it would appear as though it owes is players close to $400 million and that they continued to take their players’ money even after the Federal Investigation Bureau began moving in, knowing full well that they would have no way of paying the money back to their players.
It is also claimed that Full Tilt’s executives drew an amount of $444 million from the company with Lederer and Bitar each pocketing $41 million.
There are currently thousands ofUKpoker players waiting for Full Tilt Poker to pay them out money that is owed to them.
