Poker Winners Looking for Their Payouts

June 10, 2009

The government is still moving forward in their attempts to keep online gambling illegal, even though it is very apparent that this is not what the American people want. Federal prosecutors have informed four American banks that they want tens of millions of dollars in payments frozen that is due to people who play online poker. Needless to say, the online poker community is outraged.

The payments are totally well over $33 million, and they are due to those poker players that have been playing at four off shore poker sites like Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker. More than 27,000 poker players are affected by this request. John Pappas, Executive Director of the Poker Players Alliance, said that in the past two weeks Citibank, Wells Fargo and two other smaller banks have been asked to freeze their accounts for their poker players that come out of accounts called Allied Systems and Account Services.

These accounts process payments for poker sites and no one even realized what had happened until checks started bouncing. The checks had been written to the poker players, and when they tried to cash them they discovered that they were not being paid. The online poker sites say that they have every intention of paying players what they are owed.

Citibank said that they had received a request from prosecutors and they followed through. Wells Fargo said that they had also received the same request but it is unknown if they are following through or not. The government chose not to respond, but poker experts say that there is not really any legal recourse for them to be asking this as poker playing is not gambling.