Today, NETELLER announced that it will no longer do business with customers located in the United States who use the company to fund their online poker accounts. The company stopped serving customers in the U.S. at 12:01 a.m.
On Monday, two former directors and the two largest shareholders of NETELLER were arrested and charged with "conspiring to transfer funds with the intent to promote illegal gambling" by the federal government.
The board warned its customers soon after President George Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act (UIGE) into law in October that it will honor transactions with U.S. customers until the Treasury Department figured out a way to enforce the law. Please click here to view an article by CardPlayer.com that was published in October concerning this.
Although the Treasury Department still hasn't done that (the Department has until July to implement protocol), the arrests of the former founders pushed the publicly traded company to this decision.
According to a statement by NETELLER, "this announcement reflects the culmination of a series of deliberations and steps the Group has taken since the passing of the UIGEA in October 2006. Previous steps have included the development of country blocking and instant funds transfer restriction enhancements to the Group's software platform."
There are still several "e-Wallet" companies that online poker players can use to transfer money from their banks to their sites of choice. They include Instadebit, Click2Pay, Money Transfer, Payspark, and ePassporte. Also, the online poker sites that still serve U.S. customers all have alternatives and will work with players to help them deposit funds.
The UIGE Act is designed to stop online gambling in the U.S. by targeting the way players move money from their bank accounts to the overseas gambling sites. It was attached as a rider to the Safe Port Act, which was a must-pass bill that increased funding to make the nations ports safer.
In the wake of the UIGE Act, several poker sites pulled the plug on U.S. players. NETELLER was the largest "e-Wallet" service that served U.S. players. Since 2005, the company has moved more than $7 billion from site to site.
Please click here to visit CardPlayer.com's archive on this issue.
