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Global Gaming Business Magazine released an interesting report a few days back highlighting the challenges of legalized online gambling sites in the US ability to process payments.
“Without the top banks supporting iGaming, we cannot be successful as an industry,” says Tim Richards, manager of interactive solutions at Global Cash Access, in an interview with the industry trade publication.
From Global Gaming Business:
In an ideal world, American gamblers would be able to fund their online accounts via either debit or credit card, the most common payment methods in practically all of today’s e-commerce.
Unfortunately, the use of debit or credit cards to fund online gambling accounts continues to yield a high incidence of failure in states like Nevada, where online poker for real money has been unquestionably legal for over six months. Although the major card networks (Visa, MasterCard) are by now more or less on board with legalized online gambling transactions, the decision to process them doesn’t rest solely within them.
Cards are issued by banks, which also process payments, and banks have been extremely hesitant to get involved with anything even dubiously related to “unlawful gambling” since 2006, when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed by Congress.
And as GGBM notes, the UIGEA does stipulate some forms of Web gambling that is permitted, however, banks were mostly left up to their own devices in distinguishing the “good” from the “bad”. This has resulted in a blanket approach to all forms of Internet gambling across the board.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
