The sad and short-lived tale of the failed Equity Poker Network (EPN) and its flagship site, Full Flush Poker, might not be complete just yet. Jilted affiliate partners of the network, who like the site’s online players themselves were likely left in the lurch by the network’s collapse last fall, acquired the domain at auction recently.
The unidentified new owners of the fullflushpoker.com website have since used their purchase as a platform for announcing a possible “platform” through which players might be able to recover their lost balances on Full Flush. While the realities of that might be thin, it’s better than nothing, and the effort has appeared as an alternative to a somewhat shady-appearing effort regarding Full Flush Poker that was launched a few months back by a small, Eastern Europe-based affiliate.
Players have reason to be frustrated with Full Flush Poker’s failure, which officially occurred on September 31st, 2016. Well-placed estimates indicate that more than $2 million in Full Flush player balances went unrefunded when EPN ceased operations. The independent affiliates who marketed the site, some of whom are likely part of the group that obtained the defunct fullflushpoker.com domain, may be owed hundreds of thousands more.
The domains purchasers wasted no time in clarifying the situation. “We are NOT associated with the prior owners,” reads part of the site’s current message. “We do NOT have your money. We are NOT liable for the debts of the prior owners of this website.”
The message goes on to offer a brief recap of the Equity Poker Network / Full Flush Poker situation:
The Equity Poker Network has gone out of business. Full Flush Poker, the flagship skin owned and operated by the Equity Poker Network, has also gone out of business. The owners have ceased returning calls, instant messages and emails. Sources tell us that they have relocated from the countries in which they were operating, and a number of parties were financially injured as a result of this company closure. Player balances were left outstanding, software vendors were left unpaid, marketing affiliates were stiffed, and employees in the Costa Rican offices did not receive weeks worth of pay.
The stiffing of employees is reminiscent of the way the Scott Tom-led Absolute Poker abandoned the online-poker world shortly after 2011’s “Black Friday” crackdown. Unless things change and players are in some way reimbursed, the Full Flush / EPN fiasco will join Absolute Poker and a handful of others in a growing list of unregulated-site failures. In the vast majority of these failures, the players have gone unreimbursed.
There’s also the strong likelihood that some form of corporate fraud, embezzlement or mismanagement occurred. Full Flush Poker’s players were never refunded despite the site being owned by the same general group of people as the parent network, EPN. However, players on an independent skin, Heritage Sports, were quickly refunded their missing balances.
The statement offered by the fullflushpoker.com domain’s purchasers offers a couple of links to additional information. One goes to a post on the 2+2 forums, in a subforum dealing with EPN and Full Flush issues. That post lists six industry veterans believed to have ties to the EPN / Full Flush fiasco, including EPN founder Clive Archer, who publicly claimed to have stepped down from his leadership roles (due to health reasons) at about the same time EPN and Full Flush first exhibited signs of financial distress.
That post, from an unidentified forum poster screen-named “ffptermination”, appeared in late December and read as follows:
Full Flush Poker funds (Players, Employees) drained by:
-Jorge Barahona
-Hugues Marion
-Victor Bigio
*Clive Archer* – I would not say he is not full of ****
-Ben Johansen (PlaySafe)Legal FFP Holder in Costa Rica, (Tooth Data Processing):
-Leon Vargas
More to be released soon by a trustworthy source. (Photos, IDs, Phone Numbers, Addresses, Mails, PayPal Accounts)
Let’s go find these thieves and make them pay in any way, and any way I mean ANY.
Over 2M stolen in balances.
The post’s author nor its correctness have been determined, but the fullflushpoker.com domain’s new owners must believe the info to be authentic, hence the link to it.
The new content at fullflushpoker.com also warns Full Flush’s victims away from a separate collection attempt launched by an unknown, separate affiliate, who used the site’s failure as a reason to launch a “Game Protect” website purporting to represent the site’s victims. The fact that the Game Protect site’s owner seeks only a limited number of Full Flush victims to participate, and requires them to send hundreds of dollars to him via the anonymous Bitcoin payment method, casts serious doubts on that efforts legitimacy. Worse, several of the claims offered by the Game Protect site’s owner seem to lack knowledge of basic business-law concepts.
As the new FFP site owners noted, regarding “Game Protect”:
There is a supposedly pending lawsuit, though no evidence of this litigation has been publicly released, it very well may be a scam. Even if it is legitimate, we do not feel that the attorney, even if the litigation succeeds, will be able to recover any funds. Here is a good explanation [link to separate 2+2 omitted here] as to why it would be likely to fail. Furthermore, the lawsuit and the people promoting it are unknown and unproven. Thus, we do not recommend players to provide personal information to these parties or to send any money upfront as they have requested. To be clear, we are not associated with, nor do we endorse, these parties.
The final paragraph of the new owners’ message sums up the group’s thin hopes. “Our goal is to provide a means by which players might recover their lost balances,” they wrote. “While we finish working out the details of this program, we are asking players who suffered financial harm to contact us and provide information regarding the extent of their losses. Players need not provide any personally identifying information when submitting a claim.”
Included in that paragraph is a link to a contact form where bereft Full Flush players are asked to provide info, including their names, FF screen names, and other information such as the amount of their unrefunded FF balances and the affiliate(s) through which they signed up at Full Flush Poker.
