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Good find. I think it nails it on the head, its not illegal to place the bets, there is just some confusion about the payment rules and regulations. I hope iMEGA is able to sort everything out and that the courts finally see how ridiculous it is to have a law with unclear terms.
This might seem like a “blonde” comment, but isn’t the reason it’s such a grey area because the terminology of the bill says that it is illegal to conduct “illegal” online gaming transactions, yet there is nowhere that says online casino or poker is illegal?
Renee;206235 wrote:This might seem like a “blonde” comment, but isn’t the reason it’s such a grey area because the terminology of the bill says that it is illegal to conduct “illegal” online gaming transactions, yet there is nowhere that says online casino or poker is illegal?The heart of the matter in UIGEA comes in section 5363, entitled “Prohibition on acceptance of any financial instrument for unlawful Internet gambling”:
No person engaged in the business of betting or wagering may knowingly accept, in connection with the participation of another person in unlawful Internet gambling…
This then goes on to list any and all possible methods of electronic and “real-life” payment of any form of money.
The problem with this part of the legislation – and the Libertarians are particularly apoplectic about this – is that essentially the financial institutions are left to police the transactions themselves! The banks are required by this law to block the transactions deemed illegal by the federal government and report them. This is a truly unprecedented bit of law in America; it’s almost as though the government wants to make “citizen’s arrests” mandatory in this sphere.
The other “gray area” – more accurately, a deliberate contradiction thanks to various sucking-up lobbying efforts – is in the previous section of the bill. “Betting” and “wagering” are defined within UIGEA as “risking something of value on the outcome of a contest, sports event, or a game subject to chance.”
This is the part that Poker Players Alliance and its ilk believe is exploitable for their cause: As it stands, thanks to a handful of legal rulings, poker has successfully avoided the “game subject to chance” description. Sort of. Because, again, UIGEA requires the financial institution to determine which transactions are coming from illegalized websites. Many banks have reportedly simply rejected all gambling-seeming transactions; if Joe Creditor at First Bank sees a transaction to “OnlinePoker.com,” do you reckon he’ll reject the transaction without too much inner debate or risk the wrath of the feds because he believes poker is a game of skill, damn it?
Ironically, despite the sops in UIGEA that the Bush Administration gave to horseracing interests, the horseracing crowd is now finding that some transactions of theirs aren’t going through as banks, made paranoid, play it safe while rejecting transactions wholesale.
Meanwhile, UIGEA also makes a laughable exception for state lotteries, stating that, while the definition of betting includes “purchasing an opportunity to win a lottery,” the matter of state lotteries is a legal question for, well, the states to define. Well and good, one supposes, but aren’t those financial institutions still required to cease taking those gambling “opportunities” technically illegal under UIGEA?
Hope this makes sense, because it doesn’t to me.Cheers,
Os.OK your post makes sense, but it doesn’t answer my question..
Am I wrong?
Isn’t it true that since there is no law stating that casino and poker are illegal its a bit hard to say that conducting online casino and poker transactions are “illegal online gaming” transactions? Technically, they aren’t actually illegal apart from about 12-13 states.
Maybe I’m just mixing stuff up, or having a blond moment, but I thought that was why the UIGEA was a massive f-up .
You are right, and that is what the hearing with the banking comission was all about. The DOJ rep just sat there and said online gambling was illegal but had absolutely no answer to the question about what constituted online gambling. The banks just shrugged their shoulders.
