Pariah Website Lock Poker Finally Shuts, Owing Millions

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Wednesday, April 22nd, 2015 | Written by Lucy Brown

Lock Poker has long been a blight on the online poker landscape, and over the past few years has represented all that is wrong with unregulated iPoker. None of the site’s unfortunate customers have been able to withdraw even a cent of their funds in over a year, and it now comes as little surprise to hear that the pariah site appears to have finally shut its doors for good. Meanwhile, its former players are believed owed up to $15 million, but having obtained its iGaming license from the southern Caribbean island of Curacao, US and players around the globe appear to have few legal options available to them to try and retrieve their missing funds.

Concerns Started In 2010

Lock Poker concerns first began to emerge back in 2010 following a series of slow cashout payments, but matters began to really heat up in 2012 after the site managed to tap into the huge US poker market post-Black Friday. By April 2013, the situation deteriorated further as the TwoPlusTwo poker forum learnt Lock Poker had been treating its players to luxury all-expenses paid vacations, despite the fact many of its customers had still been waiting months for their withdrawal payments to be processed.

Lock Poker’s roster of sponsored pros subsequently decided to distance themselves from the site which had been labelled a ponzi scheme by disgruntled and frustrated customers, and over the next few months players such as Chris Moorman, Michael Mizrachi, Matt Stout and Paul Volpe wisely chose to abandon the site. As 3-times WSOP bracelet winner Michael Mizrachi commented at the time:

“I have decided not to renew my contract with Lock. I sincerely hope Lock is able to overcome its current problems and.. for the sake of online poker their situation is resolved.”

No Signs Of Life

Unfortunately, no resolution has been forthcoming and in recent months the site has seen its traffic dwindle to an average of just 10 cash game players over a seven-day period, and a peak of 20 players. Of course, these players were assumed to simply be pushing around the money they could not withdraw from site, but now Lock Poker appears to have even lost whatever minimal traffic traffic it once had, and the site no longer appears on the online tracking site PokerScout.

Helping to explain this final death knell for the site is the fact that while LockPoker.eu and LockCasino.eu software can still be downloaded from their websites, the actual software itself is no longer connecting to the sites’ servers. Meanwhile, players have been unable to contact Lock Poker’s Live support, and any emails sent are being returned as undeliverable.

“That email bounced. The server response stated that this contact address is no longer valid,” was the reply received by USPoker while trying to contact Lock.

Curaçao Regulator’s Responsibility?

Lock Poker is believed to owe anywhere between $1 million and $15 million to its legion of former players, and in April 2014 the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) even tried to come to the assistance of the poker community by sending Lock a letter demanding answers to the continued cash-out issues. The PPA also took the opportunity to warn the poker community away from the troubled site, stating:

“..we encourage extreme caution when depositing on Lock Poker. We also strongly encourage affiliates to remove Lock Poker ads and positive reviews. In the current state, these are at best misleading.”

Unfortunately, the PPA received no official response from Lock Poker, while the Curacao regulator which must have been aware of the trouble surrounding Lock seemed content to keep its license intact and allow the site to continue operating. Therefore, the Curacao regulator should also shoulder responsibility for providing no level of protection whatsoever for Lock Poker’s online customers, and should be itself be shunned in future. Additional pressure should also now be placed on the Curacao government to intervene in the situation.

Balances Unlikely To Be Honored

That said, the signs do not seem good that Lock customers will ever be reunited with their lost funds. In February this year, for instance, the former Lock Poker Director of Social Media and Affiliate Marketing, Shane Bridges, gave a revealing interview in which he blamed the demise of Lock Poker on a range of factors, including instability in the poker market, payment processing problems, in addition to the extravagant lifestyles of CEO Jen Larson and Lock programmer Brendan Young. As Bridges explained in his interview:

“I never had access to any real financials, but with no significant movement on cashouts and promises of the big turnaround now being 12 months old it would be my assumption that player balances won’t be honored now.”