With the introduction of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, banks and other financial institutions have been prohibited from letting their clients make deposits and withdrawals on casino sites online. As a result, many players who reside within the United States have had a tremendously difficult time being able to place cash into their gambling accounts. While there are a handle of alternative depositing options that players have had to employ such as wire transfers and ecash, it is quite a challenge to put forth so much energy into finding loopholes around this ban.

The UIGEA, established back in 2006, effectively made it against the law for players to gamble online. But this proved to challenging to enforce so the government made the move to target banking companies and assorted financial institutions instead. So they have cut out the middle-man between casino players and the online casinos. This had a dramatic and highly negative impact on many Internet casinos and a good number of them went bankrupt, especially those that depended greatly on a largely American base of customers.

For some casinos, they depended on as much as 75% of their profits and overall revenue from their players who live within the United States. One of the most popular and successful online payment options that gamblers loved to use, NETeller, was fined $136 million in a settlement for allowing their customers to make deposits on online gambling sites. Since then, NETeller has steered clear of conducting any business in the U.S.

Tags: online casinos, UIGEA

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Online Casino. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.