Has Lock Poker admitted that the jig is up?

Troubled online gambling site/Ponzi scheme Lock Poker appears to have given up the ghost after failing to honor a single player withdrawal request in over a year.

USpoker.com’s John Mehaffey was first to notice on Friday that the Curacao-licensed Lockpoker.eu software wasn’t connecting to the poker server and that the live chat feature was offline. Lock’s sister site Lockcasino.eu is similarly still live on the web yet its software is also offline. The poker site’s liquidity had bottomed out at around two-dozen players in recent months.

TwoPlusTwo forum member IHasTehNutz, who has exhaustingly detailed the futility of requesting a Lock withdrawal in recent years, claims the last payment Lock made to a US player was received on April 2, 2014. No Lock player based outside the US has received a payment since January 2014. Estimates of the total amount of player funds Lock is either unwilling or unable to repay range as high as $15m.

As early as 2010, CalvinAyre.com had warned players that Lock and its founder Jennifer Larson (pictured) were “chronically underfinanced.” Following the 2011 Black Friday indictments, Lock took advantage of the three main US-facing poker sites’ market exits by aggressively promoting itself as a viable option for US players. This strategy worked for a spell, but as Warren Buffett’s famous maxim warns, it’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.