FYI about EcoCard for US Casino Players

[Crusnik02]

This is the second time this has happened except first time I found it buried in terms for another payment processor.

EcoCard accepted by many casinos, terms look good, research looked good, a few sites said they didn't accept US people anymore but their site didn't and EcoCard let me register with no problem.

Click "Deposit", bold read letters at the top of the deposit page indicates that US customers can not use funds to pay casinos.

Yaaaa! More wasted time

I'm seeing a trend out there people, maybe everyone knows and I'm just the newb finding out, there seems to be two types of payment processors out there for US; The ones that look reputable and have good reviews and don't let you pay online casinos, and the ones that seem ok, not much info on them, and they still let you pay online casinos. MyPayLinQ is one, but they have so many reminders that they are not responsible if your money is lost, it sounds like it's happened too often.

It would appear the reputable payment processors are smart enough to know that the US will eventually audit and shutdown this activity if you keep trying to allow payments to online casinos.

Ima bout to put my bankroll in an online poker site that is still up. At least poker is still debateable so I'm hoping if the US targets like a Bodog, that they would be more interested in freezing casino chips and preventing Bodog from allowing US players from buying casino chips. Gotta love our freedoms

Ya, noob on the scene, I normally don't look at posts older than 12 months, usually 6 months becuase I want the latest info, I just seen EcoCard warning back in 2007. Maybe this site should have a payment processor sticky with regard to US players or something.

 

[vinylweatherman]

This is the second time this has happened except first time I found it buried in terms for another payment processor.

EcoCard accepted by many casinos, terms look good, research looked good, a few sites said they didn't accept US people anymore but their site didn't and EcoCard let me register with no problem.

Click "Deposit", bold read letters at the top of the deposit page indicates that US customers can not use funds to pay casinos.

Yaaaa! More wasted time

I'm seeing a trend out there people, maybe everyone knows and I'm just the newb finding out, there seems to be two types of payment processors out there for US; The ones that look reputable and have good reviews and don't let you pay online casinos, and the ones that seem ok, not much info on them, and they still let you pay online casinos. MyPayLinQ is one, but they have so many reminders that they are not responsible if your money is lost, it sounds like it's happened too often.

It would appear the reputable payment processors are smart enough to know that the US will eventually audit and shutdown this activity if you keep trying to allow payments to online casinos.

Ima bout to put my bankroll in an online poker site that is still up. At least poker is still debateable so I'm hoping if the US targets like a Bodog, that they would be more interested in freezing casino chips and preventing Bodog from allowing US players from buying casino chips. Gotta love our freedoms

Ya, noob on the scene, I normally don't look at posts older than 12 months, usually 6 months becuase I want the latest info, I just seen EcoCard warning back in 2007. Maybe this site should have a payment processor sticky with regard to US players or something.

You seem to have no idea how DRACONIAN the US crackdown has been recently. It is not just casinos that have lost money, the DoJ has seized PLAYER'S money en-route from casinos/poker to their banks, and refused to return it to the players even where it clearly results from a players' withdrawal of chips. One player who tried to challenge this directly was threatened by your "secret services" to "quit moaning" about it or things could get worse for them, i.e - "at least we haven't come after your house and car.... but we could".

Poker is being hunted down just as much as casinos, despite the legal debates. Operators in the past have covered players' losses by reissuing the withdrawals through their next processor, but recently there have been cases where operators and processors have bailed (or gone bust), and have NOT covered players' balances. Quicktender recently pulled out of the US, and said they would NOT be covering players' funds that were in accounts seized by the DoJ, and even players' who's funds were in other accounts were issued with a near impossible procedure to recover them, thus many players had to walk away, especially from smaller balances.

Those processors still willing to service the US are taking a HUGE risk, but not with THEIR money, rather with YOUR money along with the "float" they require operators to lodge with them. Any loss is covered by the operator, and where this is so great that it drives them "bust", PLAYERS lose their money too, and not always just the US players (Full Tilt). An additional problem is that the processors willing to take such risk are not exactly "reputable", and have been known to "run off with the money" rather than forward it to players. With a few, this may have been their intent all along, scam the operators by first getting themselves trusted with large amounts of money, and then run off with it.

eWalletXpress have claimed the money was seized, and this has been verified, yet unlike others, they have shown NO interest whatsoever in reaching an agreement with the DoJ to return the money of US customers as Neteller did in similar circumstances a few years ago.

With the big processors now all driven out of the US, the DoJ is now targetting the smaller ones, so any that work now could well stop working at any time, and any money you have tied up there is at risk of not being returned, or at best returned after months, even years, of dealmaking between the US authorities and the owners of the processor. You can no longer rely on the operator making good the loss to the player and taking the hit with their own money in order to retain the goodwill of the other US players.

"Newbies" in particular should stay well clear of this mess, and wait for some kind of US regulation. It seems some states are now trying to bring in limited forms of internet gambling, perhaps fuelled by the desire to rake in some taxes from it before other states beat them to it. You are bound to get some inter-state fighting over which state gets what tax revenues from inter state operations, something that already seems to be happening with things like state lotteries and online betting for horse racing (one of the "carve outs" from the provisions of UIGEA).

Many experienced US players have decided to stay clear of online, and get their "fix" at the land casinos until this mess gets sorted out.


As for Bodog, they are one of the DoJ's "most wanted", but they have so far managed to outsmart DoJ agents and carried on "business as usual". This cannot go on forever, and eventually the DoJ will land the "killer blow". It is possible that Bodog are ALREADY being targeted by a clandestine operation similar to the one that caught Quicktender with it's pants down, showing they were NOT the "invincible" eWallet that many users had come to believe they were.