The portal Winneronline quoted US legal expert Lawrence Walters this
week in an article on the American legal situation regarding online
gambling financial transaction bans.
Prefacing the specialist's opinion, the article commented: "Yes
Congress attached anti-gambling language to the Safe Port Act; yes
it will be harder to play poker online and yes the banks will be asked
to monitor transactions, but it isn’t the end of the world as
punters know it."
Walters says the addendum to the Act doesn’t clarify the online
gambling situation, in fact it does quite the opposite.
“The version of the legislation that finally passed is
an arbitrary, poorly-drafted, vague set of prohibitions that only
serve to further complicate the muddled mess that is online gaming
regulation in the [U.S.],” said Walters.
“In order to reach a compromise allowing passage in the
Senate, provisions that had been included in previous versions of
the bill, seeking to expand the Wire Act to include online casino
games of chance, were eliminated,” he explained.
“As a result, the remaining provisions of the legislation
are contradictory, and attempt to incorporate provisions of existing
state or federal law in order to define what activity constitutes
‘unlawful Internet gambling.”
The WOL article reports that among the opponents of internet gambling
prohibition are the banks, which would not only be required to track
all financial transactions to ensure that they aren’t related
to online gambling, but stop the ones that are as well.
Banks have a lot of business to go through in a day and determining
what transactions are related to online gambling amongst the millions
of other transactions would probably be like looking for that proverbial
needle in the haystack. And the cost of setting up detection systems
would most likely be costly.
As Independent Community Bank lobbyist Steve Verdier was quoted as
saying, “It's very tempting to think the banking industry
can stop this kind of stuff because people pay for it through banks,
but the fact is the system just wasn't really designed to do it.”