Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Lurker1998 View Post
I cannot understand what the article is saying about the $2 million mistake by Full Tilt in Lindgren's favor.

As far as I can tell from the article, Lindgren suggests he did not know what to do with the "extra" $2 million, and, since communications were so bad in general, and loans flowing so freely, he just assumed the extra $2 million was an additional loan. So, his view is he got a $4 million loan from somebody?

If I recall the Lederer interview correctly, they mistake was realized, Lederer called Lindgren relatively quickly to say the extra $2 million was a mistake. Lindgren said he had the money and would send it back and then disappeared.

It seems the journalist should have said to Lindgren that Lederer says he called you right away to say the extra $2 million was a mistake not a loan and that you agreed to return the mistaken wire but then disappeared. However, it seems the journalist never asked that (or if he/she did, never got a response or at least did not report it).

All this seems to have happened a large quantum of time before the guy ended up going bankrupt. I do not know about bankruptcy priorities, but it seems to me that correcting a mistake should be absolutely top of the line. Also, isn't taking advantage of a bank mistake like this a crime? With all the criminal charges flying all over the place, why no crime here? It seems to me we read about lots of poor schmucks who keep money from a bank error and end up in jail.

Am I missing something?
Had this happened with a bank, yes this would have been a crime.

However, Full Tilt was a criminal organization (in the view of the United States government), and is not subject to the same protections as a bank.

What Lindgren did was roughly the legal equivalent to stealing money during a drug deal.

Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson were not criminally charged yet, for example, and they were involved in the theft of HUNDREDS of millions of dollars!

You are correct that the BLUFF interviewer (who is also the BLUFF editor-in-chief) did not follow up with the appropriate questions. Lindgren was let off way too easily on that one.

With that said, I don't feel sorry for Lederer/Full Tilt in this situation. Had Lindgren paid it back, the money would have been stolen by Howard/Chris/Rafe/Ray anyway, and distributed to the various Full Tilt owners. It's not like it would have still been there for the players.

It was basically a thief stealing from a thief.
Dear Mr. Dan Druff,

Thank you for you courteous and informative response. However, I still feel a little at a loss here.

First of all there is the second issue -- how is the mistake $2 million handled in the Lindgren bankruptcy. Put aside all the people involved in this, if my company accidentally wired $2 million to somebody -- I would expect that money back right away with no issues. If that person happened to go bankrupt, I would assume that correcting the mistake would have the highest of the highest priorities in that person's bankruptcy....way higher than all the other debtors out there. I would assume I get my full $2 million back before any other debtor gets one penny. Imagine if Lindgren actually just stole money from somebody. I would assume if you are a crime victim, you can show up in the person's bankruptcy and get a higher priority than somebody who accepted the risk of lending to this fellow. If not, then something really stinks in the bankruptcy laws. The article already touched on that Lindgren prefers to pay this fellow with the greek sounding name absolutely last, but the article does not touch on who gets paid absolutely first. I would assume that people who lost money on Full Tilt have a very big interest in seeing the money go back into full tilt so that they may get their money back with less risk.

However, coming back to the main point, it seems to me absolutely wild that this behavior of keeping a mistaken bank wire is somehow excused because the party that made the mistake happens to be a thief. The action of maliciously taking advantage of the mistake seems pretty bad to me regardless of the character of the victim. If Lindgren had raped Ferguson, would it have all been okay because Ferguson is a thief? Something just seems morally wrong here. It is not like Ferguson stole from Lindgren and then Lindgren was "stealing back". From what I can tell, Ferguson and Lindgren were in cahoots (whatever cahoots are). If Lindgren thought he was stealing from a thief when he stole from Full Tilt/Ferguson, then isn't that an admission that he thought he himself was a thief (he was a shareholder in the criminal operation and he freely took dividends from it)? If stealing the bankwire is excused, then doesn't that mean Lindgren should have bigger issues since it means his dividends were all criminal proceeds? Something doesn't smell right in the analysis of this to me. Maybe I am too dense to understand what is really going on here.

Sincerely,

lurker1998