Players at severe risk in South Africa, ThePogg withdraws from SA market.

[maxd]

Jun 05 ThePOGG.com withdraws from South Africa

Posted by THEPOGG in

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Recently our new News reporter Glenn Baird published an article for us on the recent developments in the South African markets (

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). Specifically this article focuses on the decision of the South African regulator the

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(NGB) to target players in their efforts to stamp out online gambling.

It is being reported by various sources that the NGB have worked with various banks to identify online gamblers and have confiscated R1.25m (~£70k) from players.

This money is being presented as winnings but is likely to simply be withdrawals, meaning that the impacted players could easily have endured losses overall via play and the funds that have be confiscated in fact would not have made these players overall winners. To establish whether the confiscated funds were “winnings” would require the cooperation of the involved casinos, something that’s unlikely to happen.

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[Mouche12]

Just incredible, this goes beyond the 'nanny' state, it's a police state. Quite frightening.

 

[dunover]

Just incredible, this goes beyond the 'nanny' state, it's a police state. Quite frightening.

I used to live there and gambling is endemic, not quite at Australian levels but every bloody bar had a video slot in it and they were dire, sort of like the B3 games here. Having said that they had amusement arcades with the old UK AWP's in such as the 1990's Bastardcrests and you had to buy tokens to play them then swap them when you left. But if the Govt. there can't get their hands on the online revenues, this is what they'll do.

 

[vinylweatherman]

This happened to US players when seizures of payment providers' bank accounts were made. Some players did ask for their money back, but were put off by threats that they too might face criminal charges if they persisted in demanding their money back. EWX users had their money seized by US authorities, and they never got it back.

SA players may quit, or they may move to things like Bitcoin to bypass the banks and the government. Not only will this make such players vulnerable to dodgy operators, it will drive the growth of the unregulated and unmonitored Bitcoin trade, which is also used by criminals and terrorists. The more volume Bitcoin has, the better it is for both legitimate and illegitimate users.

 

[ThePOGG]

This happened to US players when seizures of payment providers' bank accounts were made. Some players did ask for their money back, but were put off by threats that they too might face criminal charges if they persisted in demanding their money back. EWX users had their money seized by US authorities, and they never got it back.

I'm not aware of any players being threatened by federal government with charges though I could understand why the players involved would feel that this is a potential liability in the situation and I may be mis-remembering. The major difference here is that with UIGEA while the federal government may have threatened some players with potential prosecution, the parties they actually went after were the payment processors, operators and banks, all of which were well aware of the legal status of what they were doing and were breaching the law as a commercial enterprise. The NGB have taken the opposite approach. They've ignored the operators and payment processors and are cooperating with the bank all to target the players, the party least likely to be aware of the law and the party that as a collective will be taking a loss due to their engagement in the activity.

I encourage everyone to look at the NGB site to see this aggressive and unethical stance plastered all over the place. Honestly, I was a little dumbstruck when I first saw their site.

TP

 

[conker]

Oh dear, more draconian measures being taken to try and curb online gambling. Why can't the governments of countries like South Africa and Australia see that online gambling is here to stay, no matter how hard you try to block it. There will always be a way that players manage to deposit online. The more road blocks they put in the way the more dodgy the sites players will end up at - a non-win / non-win situation. Regulation is the only way!

 

[lnspin]

This happened to US players when seizures of payment providers' bank accounts were made. Some players did ask for their money back, but were put off by threats that they too might face criminal charges if they persisted in demanding their money back. EWX users had their money seized by US authorities, and they never got it back.

SA players may quit, or they may move to things like Bitcoin to bypass the banks and the government. Not only will this make such players vulnerable to dodgy operators, it will drive the growth of the unregulated and unmonitored Bitcoin trade, which is also used by criminals and terrorists. The more volume Bitcoin has, the better it is for both legitimate and illegitimate users.

Ahh remember EWX real well, they still have a huge balance of mine. Wonder what the Feds did with it.

 

[vinylweatherman]

I'm not aware of any players being threatened by federal government with charges though I could understand why the players involved would feel that this is a potential liability in the situation and I may be mis-remembering. The major difference here is that with UIGEA while the federal government may have threatened some players with potential prosecution, the parties they actually went after were the payment processors, operators and banks, all of which were well aware of the legal status of what they were doing and were breaching the law as a commercial enterprise. The NGB have taken the opposite approach. They've ignored the operators and payment processors and are cooperating with the bank all to target the players, the party least likely to be aware of the law and the party that as a collective will be taking a loss due to their engagement in the activity.

I encourage everyone to look at the NGB site to see this aggressive and unethical stance plastered all over the place. Honestly, I was a little dumbstruck when I first saw their site.

TP

It may have been bluff, but one player did relate how they dared to approach the authorities to ask for their money back from the seized accounts of the payment processor, and they were bullied and threatened into giving up and allowing the feds to keep the money. I believe one thing that was also said was that they should go after the parent company for reimbursement, even though this was offshore and legally untouchable by the feds, let alone an ordinary citizen, and the money in question had already been paid to the player, it got seized in transit by the US authorities.

The NGB may have taken their approach after seeing how going after the offshore operators in the US situation didn't really have the desired effect of shutting down the activity. The players are easy targets, and they probably hope that by routinely seizing players' funds it will scare players more than going after operators who will want to absorb the losses and pay the player again, as happens with the more reputable US operations.

However, it could turn out that all the NGB achieves is a more rapid evolution towards things like Bitcoin than was seen in the US. There is no way currently that a government can seize a direct Bitcoin payment. The only successes so far against Bitcoin have been in targeting the exchanges where money moves between Bitcoin and a Fiat currency.

 

[cnichas]

Makes me mad

as a South African I can only say this , the last thing SA needs to worry about is is it's citizens playing online , in the safety of their homes instead of Risking our lives on the crime ridden streets , there has been so much heat on our president lately with his pending 780 odd criminal charges pending along with other corrupt doings resulting in South Africa now being downgraded to junk status , that this nonsense from the NGB is more than likely an effort to take some attention off of the real issues SA faces

 

[bebo67]

Un freaking believable! What about casinos that are operating out of SA? I know of one.

 

[bebo67]

as a South African I can only say this , the last thing SA needs to worry about is is it's citizens playing online , in the safety of their homes instead of Risking our lives on the crime ridden streets , there has been so much heat on our president lately with his pending 780 odd criminal charges pending along with other corrupt doings resulting in South Africa now being downgraded to junk status , that this nonsense from the NGB is more than likely an effort to take some attention off of the real issues SA faces

Agree!