April 15 – or what people now call the Black Friday Incident – has changed the lives of thousands of people across America. Online poker was used as a profitable supplement to the income of the people before the government decided to crack down on the three biggest poker rooms in the internet, freezing several bank accounts. As a result, thousands of people have lost access to all the money they deposited. Some people lost only a couple of hundred dollars – they were the lucky ones. However, there were some who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars – a life-changing amount that left them scrambling for a solution to their problems. There was, however, one thing that they could do in order to try to get their money back, and that was to submit a petition to the US District Court at the Southern District of New York. This is called a Civil Forfeiture Claim, and the only way to get it would be to submit an application within 60 days after the government announces that claims can be made – and that date happens to be July 15, as the government first published the notice last May 15.
A Window of Hope
The Poker Players Alliance, or the PPA, has been very helpful in the effort to return the money seized to their rightful owners. In fact, they have tried to see if they could file the claim in behalf of the agrieved parties so that they could help out a bigger populace, but unfortunately they neither had the right nor legal power to do so. Instead, the PPA decided to make the whole process easier for poker players by explaining exactly what they needed to do in order to lodge a claim.
If and Only If
The PPA, however, warned that the players should only apply for a claim if, and only if, it’s absolutely necessary – or rather, if they have a really huge amount of money invested in the poker sites. The whole process is rather complicated and there are some big risks on filing a claim. For one thing, if the claim is considered “frivolous” by the court, then the claimant can be laden with a fine of $250 to $5,000. It should be noted that even if everything you said in the claim is true, it may still be considered frivolous depending on the legalities of the whole matter.
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