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[casinocide]

Giftcards.com cancels virtual visa option

By Ryan McLane
27 Feb 2007
Online gamblers will no longer be able to buy virtual gift cards at www.giftcards.com to fund their accounts.

Sometime this weekend, giftcards.com officials removed the virtual gift card choice from their purchasing menu and are now offering only "hard cards," corporate gift cards, and an ATM card option.

A giftcard.com spokesperson refused to say if the move was related to online gambling.

"There is no comment on any of this," spokesperson Jason Wolfe said. "We took the service down because we are revamping our fraud system."

Casino City reported last week that you could buy a virtual gift cards and use it to deposit into a casino within two hours. That made it a great option for U.S. based online gamblers looking to find another deposit method in the post-NETeller era.

And it worked quickly enough that it came close to mimicking the Instacash option once available with NETeller.

Players can still fund their accounts using processors like www.ePassporte.com, but the options are not instant and can take as long as two weeks to process.

Two plus two people start discussing publicly how best to launder money using Neteller's P2P transfer feature. About a week later Neteller removes that feature for US accounts effectively freezing all US account assets.

Casino City writes the article "Thank You Giftcards.com" and a couple of days later giftcards.com removes the useful feature from their product.

Moral of the story? Loopholes are not intended for mass exposure in the media. Loopholes are flaws in a system that knowledgeable people can take advantage of, often to the detriment of the party the rules containing the loophole are meant to protect. Thus when loopholes receive massive media exposure they dissappear.

I don't know how the author of the article convinced himself that giftcards.com's actions were intentional and benevolent thus deserving thanks but now it seems clear that they, unsuprisingly, don't want to involve themselves in this market no matter what the potential gains.