[FTPDoug]

Okay, I believe I've got this sorted out. Here's the timeline as I understand it:

On 9/1 Eric created an account and made a deposit. Over the next 5 days he was the recipient of chip dumping from 7 different accounts, all later confirmed to be involved in credit card fraud. While this chip dumping was going on, he was also playing in legitimate games (and losing the combined fraudulant money). By 9/6 he was broke on this account and was at his current deposit limit, so he created the account he posted about ("rapperson").

Rapperson played for a total of 14 sessions over the span of 4 hours (from about 12:30AM ET until 4:30AM ET on 9/7), against a total of less than 20 players. So for those of you wondering why nobody seems to have any hand histories against this player, this is why. It looks like rapperson was only chip dumped to from one other player who later turned out to be a credit card fraudster. With this ~$8K in cash he went on to play 25/50 NL, 100/200 NL and 25/50 PLO, this time ending up with the slightly under $14K we're talking about.

He then tried to cash out, triggering the investigation.

So that's why his account is locked, his funds seized, and he's most certainly no longer welcome at FTP.

To answer the other issues this case has brought to light:

1. Why did it take from Sept 7th until Nov 2nd (it wasn't 2.5 months as previously thrown around, it was under 2 months) to complete this investigation?
-Credit card fraud and chip dumping can take a long time to verify. We take locking accounts and seizing funds very seriously, and we don't want to come to any snap decisions. That being said, 2 months is still way too long, and our customer support needs better information along the way of an investigation to respond in a timely manner to questions the investigated player may have. We're definitely striving to improve in this area, and with the recent explosion of players we've experienced, growing pains like this are an unfortunate inevitability.

2. Why don't you tell the player when the investigation is complete exactly what they did wrong?
-In 95%+ of the cases, when a player involved in fraud gets caught, they don't need or want an explanation. They understand they've been caught and go back under the rock they came from. What we can do better is that when a player argues vehemently that they're innocent, we should be providing them more details about the case. We will definitely be looking at revising the current policy regarding this.

That being said, it's my belief that Eric here knows what he did, has been lying throughout this thread (sprinkling the truth here and there), and his only motivation is to bad mouth the site that caught him.

I'll try to answer any questions this post might trigger, but understand that since this isn't my area of expertise in the slightest, answers may take a while as I track down someone who can explain this stuff to me.

Doug