The Poker Players Alliance, the industry’s main lobbying voice on Capitol Hill in the United States, has issued a letter to Lock Poker concerning the site’s payment processing and cashout times. The PPA’s Board of Directors penned the piece, which Executive Director John Pappas, Vice President of Player Relations Rich TheEngineerMuny, and Litigation Support Director Patrick Skallagrim Fleming all signed.

Lock Poker cashouts have, in some instances, taken an inordinate amount of time, leading to what the PPA called “a substantial number of complaints” from PPA members. “We have been informed that Lock Poker is taking an unreasonable time in fulfilling its customers’ requests for return of their funds,” the letter read. “In some cases, the reports are of significant delays; in others, we see reports of requests for payment having languished over a year with no progress.”

The PPA pointed out that Lock Poker’s website fails to make any mention of the lengthy withdrawal times and concurrently continues to accept deposits. It called out Lock for “the uneven nature of your processing of player requests for return of their funds” and “the many reports that players are getting little or no information regarding why such a state of affairs exists.”

The PPA questioned the “financial solvency” of the poker room, noting that a secondary market exists for Lock Poker funds in which money is traded for less than face value.

“The undersigned Board Members have discussed simply issuing direct warnings to all our members concerning the Lock Poker situation, but before deciding whether to take such action, it was agreed that Lock Poker should first be offered the opportunity to communicate its policies and situation,” the letter read. Beneath that sentence were four questions the PPA demanded answers to.

The first was whether Lock Poker segregates its player deposits from its operating funds, a practice reportedly not followed at the old Full Tilt Poker and the now defunct Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The second question was whether Lock has any plans to order its refunds by time pending, allowing players who have waited the longest amount of time for a cashout to get their funds first.

The PPA also asked for a timeline of Lock’s plan to pay players back and questioned whether the room had any“open, accurate, up-to-date information regarding time required to process customer withdrawal requests.”

The PPA closed by saying, “We appreciate that there may be legal difficulties in processing payments to US players, but we cannot ignore a situation where the funds of a substantial portion of the poker community may be in jeopardy.”

The latter was addressed to the “owners, officers, and managers of Lock Poker,” although who that consists of and where the letter was sent to are not known. Read the letter by clicking here.

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