It is hard to figure out which is worse, the fact that tens of thousands of players worldwide are going to get stiffed by the second largest internet poker company in the world or that Poker Pros and others within the company who knew that they were  running a deficit operation continued to take huge paychecks.

The U.S. government went after Full Tilt, Poker Stars and the Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet operation effectively shutting them down to U.S. players on April 15th. Poker Stars paid back their U.S. players over 100 million within a couple of weeks and should be commended. We never thought that Absolute/UB had the money to pay back players, but certainly felt that Full Tilt, with all of their Pros and tourneys and ESPN sponsored shows certainly had the funds.

But today the world found out that Full Tilt was nothing more than an elaborate fraud for at least more than 6 months prior to ‘Black Friday’. Full Tilt was labelled a Ponzi Scheme today by the lead prosecutor,  U.S. Attorney Preet Bhawawa. Apparently Full Tilt had only $60 million of the nearly $400 million it owed to players at the time of the  website seizure and subsequent shut down.

The most outrageous thing is that FTP petitioned the U.S. government to be allowed to operate ‘legally’ around the rest of the world. They were granted the same privilege as Poker Stars, but have not paid out a single cent yet. And it’s easy to see why, with hundreds of millions of dollars in the red and a long and costly legal battle ahead. Yet they continue to take deposits from players, knowing that they can not pay them if they win.

To understand how a company that is as huge as Full Tilt gets in such financial trouble we just have to look at human greed. The owners. including Poker Pros Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson, took huge sums of money every month and even after FTP had immense trouble with processing, the ownership distributions continued at a rate of approximately $10 million per month.

Which leads to the ultimate question. How much longer could the company have operated if the DoJ did not go after them? Would we still be having this exact same “Ponzi Scheme” discussion right now anyway?

Players can be rest assured that the U. S. government is going to keep the pedal down in its quest to help Americans with their morals, let’s just hope the next targets have enough money to pay players back. We already have gotten inquiries saying, “Is the company I am playing with the next Poker Stars or the next Full Tilt?” Unfortunately, for Americans, until the United States finally joins the rest of the free world and allows legal and regulated online gambling, the next Full Tilt is most likely right around the corner.