Blotter: Visa blocks gaming transactions for US players
Many of the major US-based banks and credit card companies are preparing for the provisions of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) which are due to enter into effect this summer. MasterCard previously announced that it would not process transactions between its US-based customers and offshore gaming web sites. Recently, Visa, the leading credit card provider, announced that it would also prohibit its customers from dealing with online casinos.
The UIGEA, signed into law in 2006, was intended to prohibit banks from handling transactions with online poker and casino sites and not, according to popular belief, target individual online casino players. The bill’s provisions were scheduled to go into effect in December 2009, but other legislators have postponed the deadlines to make sure that the banks have the proper infrastructure to enforce the new regulations.
One of the legislators seeking to reform the US legal approach to online wagering is Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Congressman Frank has sought to change the laws so that online gaming companies could fall under US regulation and that the federal government could gain additional revenue from taxes and licensing fees. Those revenues, in turn, would go toward covering the large national debt and budget deficits incurred in recent years.
American customers of offshore gaming sites are having an increasingly difficult time in making deposits to their accounts. When the federal government announced President Bush’s signing of the UIGEA, two major online payment processors, PayPal and Neteller, stopped processing transactions between online casino sites and their American account holders.
When many of the online payment processors decided to comply with the new law, most of the major online poker sites, including PartyPoker.com, pulled out of the US market. Industry observers have yet to decide what the withdrawal of MasterCard and Visa will mean for the remaining US-friendly sites, including PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Casino News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
