No, it's not the same. The poker sites you mentioned did try to pay (albeit with some delays); what did them in was that they spent their customer money on runn

No, it's not the same. The poker sites you mentioned did try to pay (albeit with some delays); what did them in was that they spent their customer money on running their business, among other things that are in hindsight completely incredible. They did have a lot of payment delays later in time, but that was not because of ill will, but because of issues with payment processors. Those processing companies were getting shadier and shadier as time went on, often getting their bank accounts seized, processors running away with tens of millions, et cetera. The lack of decent payment processors was what caused most of their delays by far, and incidentally also what caused them to resort to things like miscoding credit-card transactions and semi-bribing banks, which in turn resulted in them getting indicted in the US. There's some other companies that did leave players waiting for months for their withdrawals because they were short in funds, but that wasn't the major issue at FTP or AP before their government-triggered collapse. Source: I intimately know the business.