Full Tilt worldwide "Ponzi Scheme"

That is a good question. While you can never be sure that any casino or poker room (or any business you buy something from for that matter) will not go out of business tomorrow, I believe the answer is legal protection and regulation.

A major point to come out of this is the lack of separation of player and operating funds. In other words, Full Tilt was using player funds to pay their bills, which is obviously unsustainable. And the interesting point is that this was not in violation of their licensing agreement with Alderney, which is generally regarded as one of the premier regulators. In fact from what I have read, very few regulators enforce such a rule.

AAMS in Italy does.
And recently Malta changed its laws to address this sort of thing:

40. (1) A licensee shall keep players’ funds separately from the licensee’s own funds in a Clients’ account held with a credit institution approved by the Authority.

(2) ( a ) The funds in the players’ account, including funds in transit or in the process of being cleared through the banking system or by credit card processing companies, shall at any time be at least equal to the aggregate of the amount standing to the credit of players’ accounts held by the licensee:

Provided that if the funds standing to the credit of the clients’ accounts fall below the aggregate total of the amounts standing to the credit of players’ accounts, the licensee shall make good the shortfall from the licensee’s own funds within a period of thirty days of the end of the month in which the shortfall occurs.

( b ) The Authority may, at its sole discretion, consider funds held in other accounts belonging to or controlled by the licensee to be included with funds in the clients’ accounts for the purpose of this regulation.

It is a step in the right direction and we can only hope that other regulators jump on board and address this issue before it becomes a problem again.

hope777 wrote:

So, friends, even if we try to do our research, how can we ever be sure....and completely safe?

Hey hope, I think we (and especially you) should just HOPE you are not ripped off and you're safe. This makes online gambling more like gambling and more risky, the more risk, the more fun and the more GAMBLE! this is my opinion, I know we all want to be safe at the end, but I think what gives us more satisfaction is when we lose while gambling time by time.

Times like these make it extremely important for you to choose a reliable casino, eh? If even the big boys can fall, then who can we really trust? I'd say a public company that has stockholders to listen to and regulatory commissions that should keep them in line (at least a little bit).

Oh, and trust your CasinoListings. I have heard they are pretty good.

Well said Slim, because I don't think any 'financial' company is ever safe!!! At the moment as well hardly any other giant corps is safe either. So I guess if the big boys are legally cooking the books then I can't imagine what tricks the crooks in this game are up to 🙂
Also I am not sure I would ever trust a company 100% whose directors were professional gamblers.....or am I missing something here haha?!?! Some mess like Pokerstars was just bound to happen surely? 🙂
Which is why this site is a great.

You seem to be quite pessimistic guys, generally, we can never ever trust anyone, but ourselves. If it is so, than we can never ever trust our money to anyone, meaning that we should all quit gambling! Gambling is Risk!

Gambling your money on games of chance is one thing, GambleMaster. It is another for a company to take funds that are legally yours and use them to pay their bills.

That is stealing and fraud, not gambling in the traditional way.

I understand your point when you say are gambling when we deposit funds with people we don't know, but at that point it is a business transaction. These casinos and poker sites are operating as a business, who needs to credit your account appropriately, not steal from it. They generate revenues by collecting rakes or having the house edge, and that should be good enough.

My point of this post being: sure, we do expose ourselves to risk when we gamble online (I am American, so I am at about the highest risk factor right now in terms of my funds), but we should try to distinguish the difference between gambling and losing at a casino versus the illegal crap that a small percentage of rogue operators are trying to pull.

barbadosslim93 wrote:

That is stealing and fraud, not gambling in the traditional way.

Agreed.

barbadosslim93 wrote:

My point of this post being: sure, we do expose ourselves to risk when we gamble online (I am American, so I am at about the highest risk factor right now in terms of my funds), but we should try to distinguish the difference between gambling and losing at a casino versus the illegal crap that a small percentage of rogue operators are trying to pull.

Agreed as well.

What I mean is that if we do gamble on any casino we have no idea about, than we quite deserve being ripped off, as no one forces us to bet there, there are millions of alternatives, I wanted to say that it's the same as giving your money to someone you've never met, promising to double the amount and give it back to you.