Lock Poker Transfer Cashout Policy Continues to Shift

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Saturday, May 11th, 2013 | Written by Lucy Brown

Players at Lock Poker can be forgiven if they’re not quite sure what the current policy regarding cashing out funds received from player to player transfers is, as the room has shifted the posts a number of times in the space of just the last few days.

Before this recent upheaval, the policy at Lock Poker was pretty simple: For every dollar you wanted to cash out that had been received by player to player transfer, you needed to rake a dollar. If you didn’t, you faced a 15% surcharge on your withdrawal.

But that all changed when Lock Poker suddenly began cancelling large amounts of player withdrawal requests in late April. Lock representatives cited violations of their cash out policy regarding transferred funds, but the violations cited didn’t seem to breach any of the existing terms and conditions posted at Lock Poker.

Then Lock Poker did an about-face and announced a new policy: Cashouts of transferred funds would not be able to be cashed out in any situation, regardless of play-through. While less an official policy than an extremely poorly-worded announcement by a Lock Poker representative, the situation still drove the anxiety and frustration of players at Lock Poker to new heights.

Confusion reigned for the next few days as players received conflicting statements from representatives, email support, live chat support and other channels. As confusion spread, so did the severity of rumors regarding Lock’s financial situation.

In an apparent response to the mounting swell of negative publicity, Lock Poker once again revised their transfer cashout policy, issuing a statement summarizing the terms of the new conditions surrounding the withdrawal of funds from an account that has received a player-to-player transfer:

Lock has introduced a new cash-out policy for transferred funds which requires a player to accumulate at least 15% in GGR on the funds received via P2P transfer before these funds are cashed-out. Put simply, for every $100 of transferred funds to be withdrawn, $15 of rake or fees will need to be accumulated beforehand.

While this policy has managed to mute some of the criticism, the larger questions raised during “TransferGate” persist. And it’s not clear that Lock has the resources, inclination or general wherewithal to provide the answers players are demanding.

For example, a recent statement by Lock Poker CEO Jennifer Larson did little to calm the nerves of Lock Poker customers. Larson offered little in the way of specifics when it came to explaining the factors behind the online poker site’s difficulty with payment processing, and less still on the matter of how Lock plans to deal with those factors and return processing times for player cash out requests to something approaching a normal level.

It should be noted that delayed cash outs are not unheard of at US-facing online poker sites. What makes the situation at Lock Poker unique is two things: First, the room is taking an extraordinarily long time to process cash outs. You may experience some delays at rooms like BetOnline or Bovada – but delays there are expressed in terms of days or weeks, not months as is the case at Lock Poker. Second, Lock Poker customers from outside of the United States are also experiencing very lengthy delays in standard requests for funds – a situation that has led some to speculate that Lock Poker, which has always claimed that player balances are segregated, is facing a liquidity shortfall.