Absolute Poker’s Scott Tom released from US jail

[The Buzz]

Former Absolute Poker president Scott Tom has been released from US custody following his sentencing hearing in New York and has returned to Antigua, according to CalvinAyre.com. You may remember this past summer Tom, a Black Friday defendant, reached a plea deal with prosecutors that helped him limit the amount of time he spent behind bars.

From the report:

As part of his plea deal, Tom agreed to forfeit $300k and was released on bail ahead of his sentencing on September 28. Under the advisory Sentencing Guidelines, Tom was eligible for a sentence of probation.

At the sentencing, Tom’s lawyer James Henderson requested that Tom be sentenced to time served, and the prosecutor did not expressly request that Tom serve a custodial sentence. However, US Magistrate Judge Barbara C. Moses apparently went a bit ‘rogue,’ ordering Tom to spend seven days behind bars before he was allowed to leave the United States. Moses reportedly didn’t feel that Tom had actually served any time in jail during the booking process so a sentence of ‘time served’ wasn’t appropriate.

Challenged on this point by Moses, Henderson told the judge about similar cases where a time-served sentence had been imposed, but he couldn’t provide any specific legal authority to support the proposition that the booking process constituted ‘time served’ in jail.

Read more here: https://calvinayre.com/2017/10/09/bu...sed-week-jail/

[PROFRBcom]

He got a sweetheart deal. Calvin Ayre got a sweetheart deal. Full Tilt's owners and management got sweetheart deals. It seems that online gambling in the US, so long as you are a big player, results in very little jail time (if any at all). So long as they can seize some money...

[TravG]

Yep - as long as the Government got some money things seem to be pretty peachy for the owners. Unfortunately many players are still left out in the cold and haven't received a dime of the money that was in their player accounts at the time of Black Friday.

[stillshadow]

I was recently reading up again on Micon's story and kind of cool that they're even giving sweetheart deals to non-big players these days so long as they can get everyone to admit guilt and pay some sort of fine. And that's even for the actual guy running the show right in the US who then fled the country.

[PROFRBcom]

Yep - as long as the Government got some money things seem to be pretty peachy for the owners. Unfortunately many players are still left out in the cold and haven't received a dime of the money that was in their player accounts at the time of Black Friday.

Well, in the cases of Full Tilt, Absolute, and Ultimate Bet, those players who haven't been paid back can blame themselves for not checking their emails and/or not claiming their balances. The Full Tilt Settlement Fund paid out most people who submitted claims and the excess was used for the UB and AP claims which had more than enough to pay out all player claims if I got the numbers correct in my research.