At long last, there’s a little bit of good news for PokerStars, which has seen the vast majority of its assets frozen since Black Friday last April. The United States Department of Justice, which was responsible for freezing the assets of not only PokerStars but also Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, has released one account belonging to Sphene International, one of the payment processors for PokerStars.
PokerStars has been fully complying with the US Justice Department since the site was booted from doing business in America, unlike Full Tilt Poker, which has made news time and again for delays in legal proceedings, multiple class action lawsuits, and money trapped in customer accounts that has now been there for almost six months. PokerStars has released the money that their American players had in their accounts as soon as possible and has been forthright about the circumstances facing the company and how this translates for their current and former customers.
The DOJ account release of one of the accounts that PokerStars has, located in Bank Hapoalim (Suisse) SA in Luxembourg, does come with a stipulation: the company must keep a minimum balance of at least 5.5 million dollars in the account at all times. The exact wording used by the US government was: “WHEREAS, the Government and PokerStars have reached an agreement pursuant to which PokerStars consents to the restraint of $5.5 million in the Account for the pendency of the above captioned case, and the Government agrees that it does not object to PokerStars’ use of the remaining funds in that account”. In short, PokerStars has to keep money put aside equal to the amount that they reportedly made off of their US customers.
Because this 5.5 million was gained illegally, as online gambling has serious restrictions in the United States (to the point where Annie Duke recently made a public comment about the legality of poker but illegality of online poker in the US), the US Government may be planning to seize these assets once the rest of the legal action against the site has been resolved. At any rate, the money will stay there until the federal government figures out what it wants to do.
Although many players thought that Black Friday could negatively affect PokerStars as a company, it remains the leader in online poker. With so many other online poker sites pulling out of the US market (either by force or as a preemptive measure to avoid possible trouble in the future), the loss of the Americans from the player pool seems to be affecting everyone. With Full Tilt floundering, however, PokerStars has still seen steady growth since Black Friday, despite being targeted by the US government.
While PokerStars still has plenty of other accounts that haven’t been unfrozen yet, this new development has a lot of people wondering whether this is a sign that the damage caused by Black Friday is starting to be resolved. It’s too early to determine whether other accounts with PokerStars or other sites will be unfrozen, but PokerStars’ constant cooperation with the US government and general hands-up, mea culpa stance can only be helping them at this point in time.