Lock Poker = Broke, Incompetent or Both?
Posted by beanmo on Thursday, May 9th 2013 5:46 pm
Lock Poker is no stranger to controversy. Take the Girah scandal, casino bonus scandal, and Fair Play Technology to name a few. But serious questions are now swirling about their solvency. Payouts to U.S. customers have been taking 3-5 months lately. I know the U.S. payment processor environment makes speedy cashouts tough, but some of their competitors have been making it work for some time. But I wouldn't dwell on that too much since Full Tilt was able to make zippy U.S. cashouts partly due to their bank fraud.
What's really telling though is that rest of world (ROW) cashouts are delayed in some cases by 3 months or so. The Lock company line is that they ran into Skrill limits due to players making tons of player to player transfers and immediately cashing out large sums. The argument makes little sense to me as all the players transferring funds were basically cashing out anyway. So how is a few large withdrawals different than a bunch of smaller withdrawals? Plus other payment options were severely backed up as well. To me, this is pretty damning evidence that things aren't hunky dory in Lock Land. Today they apparently processed a bunch of Skrill payouts. While this is nice, it's hardly evidence of a solvent company as it could be more robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Their other gaffe with the transferred funds is beyond belief. For almost the last 2 weeks, anyone trying to cash out funds from Lock that had previously received a p2p transfer was getting a message from customer support to the tune of "You are not allowed to cash out transferred funds or money won with them." Basically receiving a p2p transfer was turning your Lock $ into Monopoly $. Great for buying Marvin Gardens, bad for paying actual bills in the real world. Only today have they updated their policy to only require a playthrough to cash transferred funds. This should have been done 10 days ago as soon as the mistake was made.
Apparently, a while back Lock promised to issue an independent 3rd party audit report and never followed through. I know if I was Lock and had 100% of the players funds, I'd be setting up an independent audit yesterday. Between their unwillingness to do that, ridiculous ROW cashout times and lack of communication, I suspect we have another Full Tilt on our hands and it's buyer beware. As someone with Lock funds outstanding, I hope they're just the most incompetent PR department ever, but I fear it's more than that.
