Regulators 'Simply Gave Up' on Blocking Online Gambling

[MissScarlett]

Regulators 'Simply Gave Up' on Blocking Online Gambling

Jacob Sullum | November 17, 2008, 3:07pm

Gambling law expert Nelson Rose says federal regulators "simply gave up" when confronted with the impossibility of implementing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).

After receiving a flood of objections from financial institutions, the Treasury Department will not require them to figure out the difference between legal and illegal online gambling, a distinction Congress deliberately left vague and regulators refuse to clarify.

The Bush administration's final regulations under the UIGEA, issued last week, require American credit card companies to invent new codes for certain transactions and require financial institutions to ask their clients to avoid illegal gambling.

Otherwise, Rose says, "everyone else can basically continue to do what they are now doing," including American gamblers who use overseas intermediaries to place bets and collect their winnings.

Money sent to individual gamblers does not even qualify as a "restricted transaction," Rose notes, and the regulations "now make it clear that payment processors should not waste their time checking on where money is sent by individuals."

The government concedes "there are no reasonably practical steps that a U.S. participant [financial institution] could take to prevent their consumer customers from sending restricted transactions cross-border."

I interviewed Rose for my June reason article about the online gambling crackdown. Last week Radley Balko noted that the Bush administration rushed to finish the UIGEA rules before its rule making authority expired, under the guidance of a former lobbyist for the NFL, one of the UIGEA's major backers.


****Please tell me these guys aren't breeding****

 

[vinylweatherman]

Regulators 'Simply Gave Up' on Blocking Online Gambling

Jacob Sullum | November 17, 2008, 3:07pm

Gambling law expert Nelson Rose says federal regulators "simply gave up" when confronted with the impossibility of implementing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).

After receiving a flood of objections from financial institutions, the Treasury Department will not require them to figure out the difference between legal and illegal online gambling, a distinction Congress deliberately left vague and regulators refuse to clarify.

The Bush administration's final regulations under the UIGEA, issued last week, require American credit card companies to invent new codes for certain transactions and require financial institutions to ask their clients to avoid illegal gambling.

Otherwise, Rose says, "everyone else can basically continue to do what they are now doing," including American gamblers who use overseas intermediaries to place bets and collect their winnings.

Money sent to individual gamblers does not even qualify as a "restricted transaction," Rose notes, and the regulations "now make it clear that payment processors should not waste their time checking on where money is sent by individuals."

The government concedes "there are no reasonably practical steps that a U.S. participant [financial institution] could take to prevent their consumer customers from sending restricted transactions cross-border."

I interviewed Rose for my June reason article about the online gambling crackdown. Last week Radley Balko noted that the Bush administration rushed to finish the UIGEA rules before its rule making authority expired, under the guidance of a former lobbyist for the NFL, one of the UIGEA's major backers.


****Please tell me these guys aren't breeding****

Better hope they ARE breeding, that way they will NEVER stop you gambling.

require American credit card companies to invent new codes for certain transactions

Complete waste of time, the processors ALREADY circumvent UIGEA by inserting non-gambling codes for gambling transactions. This is how "deposit by cell phone top-up" and similar schemes work.

Money sent to individual gamblers does not even qualify as a "restricted transaction,"

Does this mean the seizures of funds destined for individual clients were unlawful?

The government concedes "there are no reasonably practical steps that a U.S. participant [financial institution] could take to prevent their consumer customers from sending restricted transactions cross-border."

Given the creativity of the processors, the only way would have been to subject ALL cross-border transactions to extra scrutiny, and since there are so many company transactions, as well as many individual transactions, the US would have effectively cut itself off from the rest of the world in electronic finance terms.

Sadly, all too late, the casinos believed this was finally the "big one", and scarpered.

Hopefully, if something still works now, it will continue to.

Not too late yet for MGS to have second thoughts, still a week before they lock down for good.

 

[just play]

I have always used my mastercard/debit from my bank to play at RTG, but just this past weekend it got denied. I'm wondering when netspend will start getting denied.