Affiliates are in trouble

The poker affiliate payments site rakeupdate.com has been defaulting on payments sending ripples though out the industry

Just as the Full Tilt Poker scandal seems to finally be wrapping up there is yet another one around the corner. Professional poker players around the world have been using the services of rakeupdate.com for some time now only to find that the firm have been unapproachable for the past month. Despite repeated efforts to contact them players haven’t managed to get a response from the firm. It has been six weeks since the company’s network provider, Elite Affiliate Software stopped providing services to the firm due to non-payment of their funds. There is more than $1 million owed to clients and it doesn’t look like they are going to see their money any time soon.

Unlike with Full Tilt Poker it looks like personal problems between the owners of the company have led to its downfall. There was a power struggle in the company as to who was ultimately in charge between the two biggest personalities involved, Mike Haid and Daniel Persson, it was Persson who who ultimately won with Haid and several other key employees walking away from the firm. This was a year ago and the service offered by the sites run by the firm immediately suffered. Players are said to have lost massive amounts of money since the firm stopped responding to players requests.

In an interesting angle on the events of Black Friday that poker players don’t usually hear about, the people at Rake Update also suffered massive problems owing to the fact that the big payment processors pulled out of the United States, they were particularly hard hit when Moneybookers and Neteller walked away from the market. When that happened they had to rely exclusively on gaming firms that were operating in contrast to US gaming laws including almost exclusively Full Tilt Poker. When the CEREUS Network and Full Tilt were taken down by the Department of Justice (DoJ) there were no more funds coming into rakeupdate.com and yet they were still paying out funds to customers. It was inevitable that they were going to implode the question was only the timing, of course none of this was known until later. The effects of this problem are far reaching indeed, although not on the scale as with Full Tilt Poker the ripples have still been sent throughout the industry.