Going from bad to worse, Full Tilt is still in hot water, and wow: they are getting scalded. The Department of Justice just claimed that Bovada was a massive, international Ponzi scheme racking up $444 million in Ponzi-ed money.
Back in April, Tom Dwan was so confident that Bovada was going to be okay that he “personally guaranteed” $1 million to players if they didn’t get cashed out by Full Tilt. The poor guy has got to be squirming right now. To his credit, Dwan has been openly talking about the Full Tilt issues in the past few days.
Dwan has been posting on the well-trafficked TwoPlusTwo forums, where he has explained his silence over the past few months. He has been under a non-disclosure agreement, which has not allowed him to discuss the particulars of the situation. Dwan said, “I was there because some friends were looking at investing in Full Tilt, and that later changed to buying, once they realized the situation… I never personally signed anything, so I have nothing at risk, but my friends do. So that’s why I really wasn’t able to say stuff.” But now, Dwan is opening up:
“The reason I’m happy the Justice Department did that is because it cleared me of the only stuff I wouldn’t be able to say [under the NDA] was the stuff that they just said… I really believe that a lot of the owners, possibly all, possibly some, didn’t know [of the financial fraud] as of late April. I’d rather not go into complete specifics for the reasoning behind this, but from the way it came up when talking to some of the owners, I really believe that they didn’t know.”
Dwan has never owned a piece of Full Tilt. He has only been paid vast sums of money to represent them. The pro put it bluntly: “If I owned a piece of Full Tilt, I would not be doing these podcasts. I’d be sitting somewhere in, I don’t know…where’s a place that doesn’t have extradition?”
So while Full Tilt is scrambling to do who-knows-what (read: save their skins), Dwan seems genuinely confused and upset about the situation. At least these days, Dwan is being more open about it, as he blithely commented: “Thinking about Full Tilt [makes me] want to go bang my head against the wall.”