Regulation of illegal Internet gambling? Does anyone know an easy way to explain the new regulations unlawful Internet gambling businesses? I'm really not sure what is considered "illegal" Internet gambling. Some examples?
The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) are applied directly to financial institutions (mainly banks) and prevents them from allowing money to flow through them to any operator of a website that leads "unlawful Internet gambling .
The general consensus of the legal community is that this is a horribly written and poorly conceived law. This is reflected in the fact that, among other things, it fails to clearly define what constitutes "unlawful Internet gambling". It simply defines everything that is considered Internet gambling illegal any applicable jurisdiction of the United States.
It's a very circular definition because the federal courts to date have found that, apart from the son Act, there are no federal laws governing Internet gaming and the Wire Act is limited in its scope with regard to this kind of game he covers. This leaves a range of internet gambling (mainly poker and casino games) outside the scope of being "illegal" under federal law.
When one enters the state statutes and internet gambling, it is also problematic to define what constitutes illegal Internet gambling because state laws can not cover acts of interstate internet gambling since federal law prevails the law of the State.
A clear example, then maybe where I live in the state and the operator of the website works within the state and the state outlawed the kind of game in which I am engaged. This kind of Internet gambling is probably less than 1% of internet gambling is going on in the United States.
As mentioned earlier, it only regulates financial institutions are the site operators themselves which is why the operators of sites like Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker continues to have accounts of U.S. players. They simply provide other ways to allow U.S. players to deposit and withdraw their money making the UIGEA not only badly written but totally ineffective.
On the other hand, since banks operating in the United States does not want the obligations under the UIGEA, they have mostly chosen to operate under the assumption that all internet gambling sites are covered by the definition of the UIGEA, "unlawful gambling on the internet" and blocked all transactions from accounts of United States with all the internet gambling sites. So, in practice, which is "unlawful Internet gambling" whatever the banks deem illegal Internet gambling, which is almost all games on the Internet.
Posted on March 7, 2010.
