Black Friday indictee launches complaint against ex-FTP lawyer
Jeff Ifrah is alleged to have withheld "critical documentation" from payment processor Chad Elie.
Chad Elie, one of a number of payment processors indicted on Black Friday, has begun legal proceedings against his former lawyer Jeff Ifrah.
Ifrah, who Elie claims received $100,000 per month from the processor’s company 21 Debit while simultaneously representing [and receiving payment from] PokerStars and Full Tilt, is alleged to have acted “completely and with an utter disregard to his ethical obligations continued to serve both Clients despite a clear conflict of interest between them”.
Elie argues “Ifrah hid critical documentation that had said documentation been disclosed to Mr. Elie, Mr. Elie would have never continued to process poker.”
According to the complaint, Elie alleges that Ifrah “Made continuous representations…that according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) there were no problems with Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and Elie continuing to process poker transactions.
“Despite Elie’s hesitation to continue to process poker after the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission’s Involvement in Sun First Bank [sic], Ifrah continued to assure Elie that the peer to peer processing was lawful and that there were no criminal ramifications to engage in such activities,” the complaint explains.
Elie had invested in SunFirst Bank, which the Black Friday indictments cite as having processed payments relating to online poker activity in the United States, in exchange for a US$10m investment.
SunFirst entered receivership in November 2011, and its former part-owner John Campos (another Black Friday indictee) was sentenced to three months in prison last year.
Elie is one of eight [out of the original 11] Black Friday indictees to have entered a guilty plea, with former Full Tilt Poker chief executive the latest to do so. He has launched his complaint against Ifrah from prison, having been sentenced in December.
Ifrah, who has continued to represent PokerStars on matters unrelated to US online poker since the shutdown of the Isle of Man operator’s US-facing operations in 2011, could not be reached for comment at the time of writing.