Pretty much a must-read for anyone that has “uncleared” UMW funds:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=27876637&postcount=22

Some excerpts from Skallagrim:

The main distinction between players in this UMW/Quicktender/Changestream (UMW for short) and the FTP/Cereus case is that in the UMW situation players have the ability to identify a specific seized bank account with funds in it that were clearly and specifically directed to them. If the reported information is correct, the total seized should equal the amount of “uncleared” transfers reported by UMW. This allows the UMW claimants to easily argue that they are more than “unsecured creditors” – UMW claimants can say that the money seized is not merely “UMW money and they owe me money”; they can claim that the money was money UMW had already credited to me and was merely in transit to me. IOW, it is not money owed to me (unsecured creditor) it is money already “mine.”


But this only gets you over the “identify the specific property claimed” and “identify the claimant and state the claimant’s interest in the property” parts of what is required to file a claim. It does not by any means guarantee a victory in court that leads to the government having to give you the money.


Ultimate victory depends on defeating the government’s claim that the money is forfeitable “proceeds of illegal activity.”

And another:

To explain it by way of a not perfect but more familiar analogy, say you were playing poker in an underground card room in NY. In NY the law is also clear that the player is not subject to prosecution, only the room operator is breaking the law. The room is raided and all money found seized. Money on the table, money in the cage – that is clearly money subject to forfeiture. Money in your wallet you never even put on the table is clearly money not subject to forfeiture. Money in a sealed envelope with your name on it held by the room’s doorman for you to pick up on your way out – that is the kind of question you are facing here ….


And the answer is not certain. Where the answer is not certain, sometimes the best move is to litigate to get an answer. Sometimes not.

Just when we thought the case turned cold, more info comes up!

Unfortunately, I’m a bit late to this informing you guys.  I just got back home from participating in a clinical study for childhood cancer survivors at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN…but here we go, some interesting stuff below!

On to the news, 2+2′er “BigOlTatties” broke this news and PM’d me the details.  Turns out he found something very interesting on forfeiture.gov.  Here’s the screen shot from forfeiture.gov, since they tend to remove these listings fairly quickly:

This shows the forfeiture notice of funds seized in the amount of $1,820,008.93 from a Deutsche Bank account held in the name of ABN AMRO Bank NV.  You might recall that I was the first to draw the link to “uncleared” funds being snagged by the United States Secret Service in this post and follow up with more detail here of my suspicions.

Also, here’s a screen shot from justia.com showing the court case, office, case number, etc:

BigOlTatties was able to confirm these details for me through the link to the forfeiture.gov page and then further help by 2+2′er Diamond_Flush uploading/posting these government case documents on google docs:

US vs 1.8mil seized from DBT Case 2:11-cv- This document contains information about the complaint, the nature and basis for the seizure as well as some facts supporting their action (violations of laws, jurisdiction, naming the bank account as the defendent).

Exhibit A, Declaration by Agent Grant Wagner – This document is a bit more interesting.  It details how the agents of the United States Secret Service Southwest Florida Financial Crimes Strike Force (USSSSWFFCSF …for short… lol no, I’m not making that up) went about their investigation.  In this document it talks about some cardrunners pros receiving some big amounts from Quicktender.  It appears as part of their case, the secret service sorted the data by who received the various wires between from chargestream and then summed up the amounts to see who got some of the biggest cumulative withdrawals and then went to work on identifying who is who to build their case.  It just so happened that 2 of the 3 players they cited in this document were cardrunners pros (sick brag?).  They did not give any names but they did use sources such as linkedin.com to identify and confirm that these players in question were professional poker players and receiving funds from Chargestream, aka UMW/QT.  According to the document there were 13,077 transactions in and out of the Chargestream accounts totaling just under $53 million (about $23.7 mil incoming and $29.2 mil outgoing) .

The agents also googled to find various sources on online gambling web forums talking about ways to process payments in and out of some of the various poker and gambling sites.  Quicktender came up and there were also reportedly open online gambling investigations by the USSSSWFFCSF looking into BayDonHill PLC, a name that I hadn’t heard of until this document, which was linked in a forum post by a user saying that withdraws from Quicktender.com might show up under that name or Chargestream.  This also potentially confirms other suspicions I had about the nature of John Briggs and Paul Templeman’s businesses.  They developed the abstraction of “UseMyWallet” and the implementation of “Quicktender” for the specific reason of planning head in case they get nailed by the feds eventually. As I mentioned in that post, this is not their first rodeo.

The document also went on to say that they did conduct interviews with local online poker players.  I’m guessing this is to make the case appear to be somewhat relevant to them geographically (they have a section noting the Venue in the Middle District of Florida where they are based).  According to the document, about $145k of the $23.7 million was received by users in their area.

This is just speculation, but when I read about the agents going to houses and interviewing people, I did remember a posting in the Poker Legislation forum on 2+2 that described a visit by the Secret Service.  It’s unclear if this poster is one of the people interviewed as part of this investigation, but certainly it’s not one of the interviews that were named by date as this post was made in February and the document mentions interviews in April.  It was either part of this investigation or the Secret Service has some other ongoing efforts.

Another interesting tidbit, to relate this case back to some previous ones, the Exhibit A document says the following: “In February 2010, the USSS arrested a subject in the Middle District of Florida for operating an unlicensed money transmitting business…”  That, my friends, would be Michael Olaf Schuett who according to the linked article was mailing 150 parcels a week through FedEx and where they opened many of the parcels to find checks and reported it to the government.  Other suspicions came from bank employees where he was wiring in and out millions.  As stated by the Exhibit A document, after learning about how much bank wiring was going on, the USSS started a Federal Investigation which eventually lead to this case.

I’d like to keep digging into some of this stuff but for now it’s bed time.  Hopefully more up this weekend!

It’s been nice to get back to my roots a little bit.  As some of you know, before becoming a poker pro I was a web development consultant for about 5 years.  Since starting poker seriously, I programmed less and grinded poker more.  Obviously with Black Friday, the grinding has…”ground” itself down to a much slower pace.

For StolenBankrolls.com, I outsourced most of the development to a guy I’ve had pretty good results from with a previous project.  I wanted to do the site in Ruby on Rails 3 and given that I didn’t have any professional experience at this technology, it provided a good opportunity for me to learn something new and feel productive.  I wanted my developer to focus his expertise on the bulk of the work, but I also wanted to add some of my own personal touch…Enter the interactive map!

The past few days I’ve been working on making the site look a little nicer and make the navigation a little better.  I’ve added the green navigation bar plus a new totals page that shows where some of the biggest bankrolls have been submitted (by state for the US and by country for the rest of the world).  Check it out, I hope you like it:  StolenBankrolls.com/totals

I’ll be on the QuadJacks radio program tonight at 7pm central time talking about the FTP hearing tomorrow and StolenBankrolls.com.

After the launch of StolenBankrolls.com, we had a lot of intrigue, interest, and questions.  Many people have expressed concerns for the security and the data we are collecting.

From the beginning of the project, I wanted to make sure that we didn’t get any data from anyone that could compromise their security.  I simply do not want the headaches of being responsible for that…plus for our purposes, it’s simply unneeded.  I want everyone to feel comfortable with the site.  We started off by collecting less sensitive data than some other sites that we’ve been compared to… the so called “poker petitions.”  We are not a petition and don’t aim to be.  We don’t want anyone to feel like any data of theirs is in trouble.

As a result, we’ve decided to remove the city field all together, so no one can even enter it.  We also changed the “last name” field to simply be the first letter of your last name.  Anyone who currently entered data that is no longer being collected doesn’t have to worry either.  We are clearing all the cities from our database as well as the last names, except for the first letter.

I hope this will encourage people to be more comfortable and help us spread the word.  I think our goal to get the word out to more major media outlets and put a more personal touch on this situation is doable, but we need everyone’s help and support.

Thanks to everyone who has signed up and tweeted about us, mentioned us on facebook, or any poker forums.

Aaron / WiltOnTilt

So in light of all the recent events with Black Friday, Blue Monday, and various unnamed government seizures and poor choices by poker sites, I’ve decided to launch StolenBankrolls.com, which is a division of PlusEVPoker.com. In short, StolenBankrolls.com is a way for everyone to submit their data for their bankrolls that are currently locked up as a result of either government seizures (IE FTP/UB/QuickTender) or websites going under because of bad business practices (Eurolinx, Tusk, etc).

The purpose of this site is to help build awareness. I would like everyone to submit their details (don’t worry, we are only collecting the most basic info, and we want no sensitive personal information, and we are not giving out your info) so we can keep people informed about any news gathered as well as give people the opportunity to stay up to date with happenings here at PlusEVPoker.com.

Feel free to hit me up with any questions you might have, check out the info on the site: http://www.StolenBankrolls.com and check out the FAQ: http://www.plusevpoker.com/stolen-bankrolls-faq