More Bad News from Neteller

[Billman]

[ QUOTE ]
The sky isn't falling, we're just in the middle of a really nasty storm. All the impacted sites--which means all the sites--are working on ways of adding payers. It will take a little while but they'll come up with something.

They want our money too much.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks for stepping up and helping me prove my point. Here's a quote from you on 10/17 in a thread titled Neteller going bye bye??

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They aren't going to make money by shutting people out.

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[augie_]

wow, i am now very glad that neteller would never let me sign up for an account.

[Billman]

[ QUOTE ]
Agreed. The thing with Neteller is a complete debacle, obviously, but I have little doubt that Stars and FT would move heaven and earth to devise an easy way for Americans to move money around.

[/ QUOTE ]

Let's pretend that moving heaven and earth still doesn't result in a viable way to fund accounts. I mean, if I had a kid with some fatal disease I would move heaven and earth to find a treatment but . . . that doesn't mean that one will be found.

And no, I don't consider being able to put $100 on at a time via pre-paid debit cards as a viable alternative. The problem with almost any solution that can be put forth is that it will reek of money laundering and will fall under a whole new set of rules and a very experienced team of prosecutors who have been playing this cat and mouse game for decades.

So let's review people's possible views on this topic:

a) There's got to be a way and I just know that somebody will step forward with a plan.

b) If there's a way around this then let's hear it but until then I'm going to assume that the funding picture for online poker sites looks pretty bleak.

Which one has any sense of logic to it?

[HSB]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The sky isn't falling, we're just in the middle of a really nasty storm. All the impacted sites--which means all the sites--are working on ways of adding payers. It will take a little while but they'll come up with something.

They want our money too much.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks for stepping up and helping me prove my point. Here's a quote from you on 10/17 in a thread titled Neteller going bye bye??

[ QUOTE ]
They aren't going to make money by shutting people out.

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]

They aren't. They're out because the ACH transactions aren't available to them anymore. Poker sites don't care about the specific mechanism of the cash transfer so they can find something other than ACH.

[jrz1972]

[ QUOTE ]
So let's review people's possible views on this topic:

a) There's got to be a way and I just know that somebody will step forward with a plan.

b) If there's a way around this then let's hear it but until then I'm going to assume that the funding picture for online poker sites looks pretty bleak.

Which one has any sense of logic to it?

[/ QUOTE ]

Both do.

I'll admit that I did not see the ACH thing coming. Knowing everything that's happened in the past couple of weeks, I'd now say there's something like a 10%-15% chance that Stars/FT come up empty and US players are left with no particularly great way to fund their accounts or cash out. (I agree that phone cards and the like don't qualify as a good money management system). After UIGEA was passed, I would have put that probability at more like ~1%, so I agree that things look bleaker than they did.

But on the other hand, Stars and FT stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars from Americans. It seems to me that Lee Jones et al are prefectly happy to live the rest of their lives without setting foot on American soil ever again. As long as they're careful, I'm still willing to bet that they can find some like-minded folks that have access to the financial system who are happy to pick up a piece of this action. Unfortunately for Americans, those "like-minded folks" aren't going to be publicly-traded, regulated firms like Neteller. They're going to be shady and semi-anonymous, like if Neteller were run by Prima. But still it will be workable.

[1p0kerboy]

Here's an idea of getting money out of Neteller.

[HSB]

[ QUOTE ]
a) There's got to be a way and I just know that somebody will step forward with a plan.

b) If there's a way around this then let's hear it but until then I'm going to assume that the funding picture for online poker sites looks pretty bleak.

Which one has any sense of logic to it?

[/ QUOTE ]

A

We're not dealing with a disease where nobody knows what the solution is. We're dealing with cash transfers which happen approximately eight billion times a day.

They don't need to invent a new process, they just need to apply one to their specific situation then design, test, and implement the software interfaces.

I think it's safe to assume that they have no higher priority right now. Testing this kind of crap is what I do. It takes time. A four week turnaround would be pretty damn quick.

If a site was going to cut out of the US market they'd have done it when they were threatened with jail time, not when faced with an urgent software update.

[Billman]

[ QUOTE ]

I'll admit that I did not see the ACH thing coming. Knowing everything that's happened in the past couple of weeks, I'd now say there's something like a 10%-15% chance that Stars/FT come up empty and US players are left with no particularly great way to fund their accounts or cash out. (I agree that phone cards and the like don't qualify as a good money management system). After UIGEA was passed, I would have put that probability at more like ~1%, so I agree that things look bleaker than they did.

But on the other hand, Stars and FT stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars from Americans. It seems to me that Lee Jones et al are prefectly happy to live the rest of their lives without setting foot on American soil ever again. As long as they're careful, I'm still willing to bet that they can find some like-minded folks that have access to the financial system who are happy to pick up a piece of this action. Unfortunately for Americans, those "like-minded folks" aren't going to be publicly-traded, regulated firms like Neteller. They're going to be shady and semi-anonymous, like if Neteller were run by Prima. But still it will be workable.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not to be a jerk but you're pulling those numbers out of your arse so why should we give them any credit? And if you didn't see the eventual demise of Neteller and every other ACH processor 3 months ago then I can't really take a whole lot of what you say on this topic with any level of seriousness. For anyone who wasn't in a complete state of denial, the shutting down of the ACH system to gaming transactions was obvious from even a casual read of the bill. I too was caught off guard by how quickly this happened but I've been saying that this was inevitable from the day the bill passed Congress.

And while Stars/FTP stand to make hundreds of millions it doesn't mean that they have super-powers that allow them to magically make transferring money easy. Or to put it another way, drug dealers and others who conduct illegal businesses have been playing this game for decades and they can barely keep one step ahead of Johnny Law. How are a bunch of guys who have never even ventured into the world of money laundering going to come up with a system that goes undetected? At least Mr Drug Kingpin only needs to worry about large lump sums. How can you hide 100,000 people transfering small amounts? It was the volume of transactions that killed Neteller. Every bank in the world knew them because they processed so many transactions. That's why they were so easy to shut off. How do you create a similar system that isn't just as obvious?

If I heard people saying "Well this is how you could bypass the ACH system and stay clear of money laundering laws" I would be much more optimistic. But there aren't even good hypothetical models being proposed. Everyone is just sure that because Starts/FTP stand to lose so much money that there just has to be a way. That's it. Hope.

The only long term solution with any credibility is legalization. Be it in the form of a carve-out or a complete reversal of online gaming laws which legalize and regulate online gaming. That's one reason I fully support the idea of boycotting the online gaming sites in order to make they change their strategy of simply cooking up new payment methods to actually committing some of those hundreds of millions they've been making off of us into campaigns to change the legal status of online gaming. A new payment method is simply going to delay the inevitable. What we need are massive lobbying efforts. We need awareness campaigns that let even non-poker players know how stupid this law is. We need for these online sites to pony up some real cash and help make this happen. If they're not willing to do that then why should I reward them with my business? They have more at stake than I do yet I'm the one donating to the PPA, posting on my blog, and calling my lawmakers. It's their turn now.

[Sniper]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Agreed. The thing with Neteller is a complete debacle, obviously, but I have little doubt that Stars and FT would move heaven and earth to devise an easy way for Americans to move money around.

[/ QUOTE ]

Let's pretend that moving heaven and earth still doesn't result in a viable way to fund accounts. I mean, if I had a kid with some fatal disease I would move heaven and earth to find a treatment but . . . that doesn't mean that one will be found.

And no, I don't consider being able to put $100 on at a time via pre-paid debit cards as a viable alternative. The problem with almost any solution that can be put forth is that it will reek of money laundering and will fall under a whole new set of rules and a very experienced team of prosecutors who have been playing this cat and mouse game for decades.

So let's review people's possible views on this topic:

a) There's got to be a way and I just know that somebody will step forward with a plan.

b) If there's a way around this then let's hear it but until then I'm going to assume that the funding picture for online poker sites looks pretty bleak.

Which one has any sense of logic to it?

[/ QUOTE ]

Bill... those who had been following my weather forcasting knew there was a hurricane coming... this too shall pass...

[jrz1972]

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Not to be a jerk

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Well, you are being a jerk. From the tone of your posts, it sounds like you're more interested in kicking people when they're down and winning an "I Told You So" contest than actually engaging in dialogue.

For the record, I have no money whatsoever tied up in Neteller, and I'm just a recreational player who doesn't rely on poker for my income. I have no particular reason to engage in wishful thinking on this. I just don't understand what motivates a person to come along and taunt fellow human beings who have tens of thousands tied up in Neteller and elsewhere.

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but you're pulling those numbers out of your arse

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They're just my subjective guess. I know a fair amount about this industry, and I wouldn't describe it as pulling numbers out of my arse, but obviously I wouldn't disputed that it's just educated speculation on my part.

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so why should we give them any credit?

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So don't. What do I care?

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And if you didn't see the eventual demise of Neteller and every other ACH processor 3 months ago then I can't really take a whole lot of what you say on this topic with any level of seriousness. For anyone who wasn't in a complete state of denial, the shutting down of the ACH system to gaming transactions was obvious from even a casual read of the bill.

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL. I don't know of anybody who predicted this development. This pretty much caught the entire industry off guard. If only they had listened to you, Mr. Anonymous Message Board Poster!

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Everyone is just sure that because Starts/FTP stand to lose so much money that there just has to be a way. That's it. Hope.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's party hope, and partly a recognition of the fact that the government has a very hard time quashing markets involving willing buyers, willing sellers, and high profit margins.

Like I said earlier, I'll grant that it's possible that the US could somehow get firewalled off from the rest of the poker world, but it's still fairly unlikely IMO. That's a pretty tall order for the government.