Update: Lock Poker Issues Official Silence-Breaking Statement

In the latest development with Lock Poker, the company management broke silence and announced that player-to-player money transfers are now subject to a new policy restricting any withdrawal until 15 percent of the amount has been generated as rake. Furthermore, in their website statement, the management advised that "Through a detailed investigation over the past few weeks the Lock security team uncovered a large group of persons that were abusing the P2P transfer policy and creating a large network of mule accounts to move and withdraw funds without any play at all taking place. "To deal with this situation a policy change was put into place to clear out the backlog of withdrawals by accounts with little to no play and increase the speed of withdrawals for players taking actual winnings. "Lock has introduced a new cash-out policy for transferred funds which requires a player to accumulate at least 15 percent 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 Put simply, for every $100 of transferred funds to be withdrawn, $15 of rake or fees will need to be accumulated beforehand. "The policy change was put in place explicitly to put an end to money laundering via Lock's player transfers. Players withdrawing winnings are not affected. "Lock will continue to process withdrawals and work to reduce all withdrawal delays over the coming weeks. "A large amount of mis-information has been spread recently on various poker news sites and forum postings about player funds being lost in recent banking scandals; none of this is true." In a separate statement, Lock CEO Jennifer Larson said that her company is working to find new payment processors to speed up payment times, and that some improvement will soon become apparent. She explained that “In terms of slow payouts there are a number of reasons for this. There was a group of people who were buying and cashing out players bankrolls and not playing at all - this was a large volume and was causing legitimate players' cash outs to be delayed, as the scheme was using accounts incorrectly marked as belonging to affiliates. “The other main reason is that Lock [is] one of the largest poker sites that continues to serve players in most States in the US. This means that all Lock payments processors must be discreet as the DOJ has shown repeatedly that it likes to seize the players' funds." And while this may raise questions regarding how Lock Poker and its Revolution network have managed to evade DoJ action despite openly attracting US punters, Larson made another statement that may trigger questions why non-US players are experiencing delayed payments. Namely, she used a pipe analogy to explain that the enterprise has the money but not enough pipes to get it through to players timeously in the United States – which does not provide reason for failure to pay non-US players.