I try to use neteller as much as I can, and I enjoy the challenge of a bonus WR.
I do not like using my bank cards too much, since a lot of gambling transactions on my account could and would damage my credit rating. which since i'm in business, is a big deal for me.
But some casinos are now disallowing bonuses with web wallet deposits, citing fraud as the reason.
which got me thinking....
1) Why don't ALL casinos feel the need to 'protect' themselves from this 'fraud'?
2) Are the casinos with restrictions gaining more from not paying the 'fraudsters, than they're losing from new and existing customers?
3) For those casinos, who feel the restrictions are really necessary. Why not just limit those restrictions to the welcome bonus, where you're dealing with unverified new customers, rather than verified regular customers?
4) Why not make verification compulsory before accepting a first deposit from a web wallet?
4) Are the criminal elements really interested in a 50% up to $£€50 reload bonus?
5) Or is it a case of... with a lot of the casinos who impose web wallet restrictions, they charge for credit and debit card deposits, where as web wallets are free?
This is the biggest contradiction. Surely if they wanted to push players away from web wallets and towards cards, they would make card deposits free and charge for web wallets. Both methods incur fees for the casino, and when they offer free deposits they are absorbing these fees, yet they choose to absorb web wallet fees but not card fees. If anything, they charge MORE for card deposits than it actually costs, so far from subsidising these fees, they are adding a mark up, and for debit cards almost the whole of what the casino charges is a mark up, because the transaction itself is pennies. It's only credit cards where the fee is a percentage of the transaction.
There are some other oddities too, the other method that is also free to deposit, AND is eligible for bonuses, is the cash substitute eVoucher, which is bought, for cash, over the counter with a shop clerk doing the KYC on the fly, which often means little more than checking that the notes you hand over are genuine before generating the voucher. It may well be limited to £150, but this is per person per shop per day, and simply by going to several shops it's easy to launder a couple of thousand in cash, then use the vouchers for depositing into the casino, and because it's impossible for the casino to pay out by this deposit method, another has to be used, even if this is a cheque through the post to the registered address. This might satisfy KYC regulations, but it does not "follow the money" right from source to payout, hence it's a money laundering risk - a surprisingly lax "loophole" for an industry that has a reputation for being far stricter about anti money laundering than any other industry.
If fraud is taking place within the Neteller environment, then it's Neteller that is risking the wrath of regulators in doing so little about the problem that it has caused merchants to start losing trust to the extent that Neteller deposits are being discouraged in favour of cards and even vouchers.
Oddly enough, PayPal isn't included in this ban, yet it's a web wallet that runs on similar lines to Neteller, and is available for gambling deposits in the UK at least where the casino has a UK license.
Far from a "temporary" situation, this problem with Neteller is steadily getting worse, and unless Neteller take action to address the concerns of it's merchants it risks a steady decline in turnover as more and more users are told by merchants that they will get a much better deal by abandoning Neteller and using alternative deposit methods.
Opening another bank account with a different bank for use with casinos prevents your main bank from finding out. Whilst the other bank account and how you manage it may show on your credit file, the individual transactions don't, not even general information about the type. Sharing this level of detail could get banks into trouble over the Data Protection Act, and this act says that only as much data as is "necessary" should be collected and processed, and when it comes to sharing with third parties, this "necessary" is very important, and credit reference agencies don't need to know what you spend your money on, they just need to know how well you manage your affairs.
The time has probably come for a new deposit method, as convenient as Neteller, and with the same low fees (mostly free) for transacting with merchants, but without all the baggage that Neteller has accumulated that has merchants seriously worried that Neteller are allowing organised fraud to thrive, and are not doing much about it because it's the merchants that suffer, whereas Neteller makes even more in fees by being the fraudster's method of choice.