It is now two weeks later( four weeks plus from the original transfer instruction) and still no news on the requested Western Union transfer although there have been numerous emails back and forth.
Have you contacted a Lock rep outside of email? Like I've said to others, go to the Lock forum on 2+2. There are threads dedicated to cashout status where people post their timelines and discuss their experiences. There you can gauge how long current payouts are taking on average. If WU is up to 4+ weeks now it will be evident. If most are still reporting 2-3 week WU turnaround, then obviously something went awry with yours and you should ask Shane or Eric (Rizen) to check into it for you. What you will find are a lot of "inexperienced" cashers who think they're being scammed after not getting paid for a week, but what you won't find are dozens of people demonstrating that they've never received their money after a considerable wait. Point being you WILL get paid, but you cannot expect any sort of timeframe comparable to the heyday of online poker pre-UIGEA and pre-BF.
Email support sucks. It sucks on virtually every site, and you'll seldom get anywhere with it. Go seek out a forum rep somewhere, and in Lock's case that's at 2+2.
I'm also assuming that you're monitoring your cashout history on the cashier site? Because if you're expecting email communications to tell you how things are being processed, you won't get them. Some payment processors will generate emails while most won't. I think out of the half dozen or so Lock withdrawals I made, I might have gotten email updates with one of them.
How is it that someone or some company performing a paid service for you is completely beyond your control? That part of your post is puzzling.
Think about it for a moment and it makes perfect sense. They're essentially working in a black market, where traditional rules of service level agreements don't really apply.
Lock doesn't put the money directly into your
hands. Their payment processor doesn't even put the money directly into your hands.
In case a reminder is necessary, banks and payment processors are prohibited by Federal Law (UIGEA) to process online
gambling transactions (well, in light of recent DOJ and Court decisions we can debate that, but until specific legislation exempts it that's what financial institutions are operating under). So the only processors you're going to get are those that can be fooled into thinking your business is something else (which doesn't take them long to figure out) or shady ones that know they're breaking the law and thus tend to be untrustworthy and/or unreliable. In Lock's case, and likely other sites as well, they deal with a "top level" processor, typically not based in the US, which themselves farm out the transactions to a group of US processors that are in a constant state of flux. These levels of indirection are designed to help shield the poker site from the end processor, but a consequence of that is it makes the process slow and highly variable.
Many processors have just run off and stolen the sites' funds, and it's not like the site has any legal recourse -- think back to the FTP situation where their mismanagement shortfall was exacerbated by
one processor
that stole $42M of player funds from them. There is a regular churn and turnover of payment processors because of these reasons, which also causes the widely varying cashout times. Often a transaction starts out down one path before failing for any number of reasons and being restarted down a different path. You and I can request the exact same cashout at the exact same moment and have two completely different experiences based on the route our cashouts take. Just look at the forum complaints of those who see requests made after theirs getting paid before theirs and asking why they aren't paid in order.
The fact is the site has no control over this. It doesn't follow the conventional rule of "if I don't like your level of service, I take my business elsewhere." They're constantly taking their business elsewhere and facing the same problems. There is no other choice if they want to keep servicing US customers, and this is also the reason so many sites are leaving the US market. Therefore you as a US player have to accept that if you're going to continue to play.
To be clear, I'm not being a Lock apologist (or any site). I'm just explaining the climate that's ultimately responsible for these levels of support. Sometimes sites get clever and figure out ways to short-circuit the process and speed things up for awhile, but it's always a temporary process. Lock has had the reputation for being both the fastest and the slowest of the post-BF cashouts. Before Lock took over the Cake network, there were people waiting SIX MONTHS for Cake cashouts who were ecstatic that Lock was stepping in. All US facing
poker sites are facing these problems, so again as a US player you have to suck it up and accept it, move to a different country, or go play live.