Home / Poker News May 2011 / AP and UB Strike Deal with DoJ
AP and UB Strike Deal with DoJ
Posted by: James Carter. - Thu, 2011-05-12 13:49
After Full Tilt Poker and
PokerStars have reached separate agreements with the DoJ regarding the Black Friday indictments, it now looks like Absolute Poker and UB have struck their own deals with the US authorities too. Of course, the DoJ is not looking to grant any sort of concessions for the online poker operators: as in the case of
Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, the agreement is aimed at facilitating the transfer of funds from the two Cereus poker rooms towards US citizens, thus creating an opportunity for US-based players to recover their monies that got stuck at the online poker rooms after Black Friday.
The US Attorney’s Office agreed to facilitate third parties working with the aforementioned two poker sites to start returning the funds to US players. In exchange for the unblocking of some of their funds, the Cereus sites had to provide proof that they had indeed stopped accepting US players immediately after the April 15 moves.
Apparently, the Cereus sites have not asked for their domain names back, and the DoJ did not decide to give it back to them.
Absolute Poker released a statement regarding the deal, in which they said that returning the stuck funds to their US customers had always been their top priority. Of course there are several legal issues to be dealt with before the money can start moving back towards the players. AP’s US legal team, Blank Rome LLP is apparently busy to get all the legal hurdles out of the way as soon as possible.
Despite the increasing probability that US players will in fact get their stuck monies back from AP and UB, we do not currently recommend that players from outside the US sign up with any of the Cereus sites. The likelihood that the sites will announce bankruptcy is still a very real one, therefore we cannot guarantee the safety of player funds deposited at AP or UB.
