Below was in today's Memphis Commercial Appeal, the main newspaper in this area. I don't have a link yet (working on it), but this is a cut and paste of an article (it's copyright material, so I'm posting snippets only):
Memphis Commercial Appeal 06/10/2009, Page A03
Online poker accounts frozen
An advocacy group for online poker said Tuesday that the federal government has frozen more than $30 million in the accounts of payment processors that handle the winnings of thousands of online poker players...
... The Poker Players Alliance said the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York instructed three banks to freeze the accounts.
In a letter dated Friday and faxed to Alliance Bank of Arizona, the prosecutor said that accounts held by payment processor Allied Systems Inc. are subject to seizure and forfeiture ...”
What this means is that Account Services writes checks to players who are cashing out. As a result, thousands of players receiving checks from the company will try and cash them and they'll bounce. We've already seen this in a blog piece called Puke by cracknaces.
UPDATEs: Here's a link to The New York Times article. Thanks to Poker Cats for providing it on his very nice web site.
And this link to a Wall Street Journal piece that you can read here thanks to a link from Ken P's interesting web site.
That does not sound good. As you know I am not a big fan of online poker but the government seizing online players money does not sit well with me. They need to either legalize it and run it out of the U.S or Canada or get their noses out of it.
ReplyDeleteThis news has been slow getting out. I read rumors of such last week and removed some of my winnings, maybe too late.
ReplyDeleteNot sure where we're going will all this anti-online gambling activity.
ReplyDeleteThe NFL, of all organizations, just help squash an Online Gambling bill getting to the Texas Senate for approval. Not really sure why everyone is so against this, especially in States with a Lottery.
I guess us poor Americans will have to ship our money to our Canadian friends and let them be our brokers.
Re this news slow getting out. The following works for both Google News and Yahoo news:
ReplyDeleteAt the first hint I got of this problem, I did a search on Google News for "online poker" and another for "echecks." The search results page shows all the recent news article on the subject. It also will have an RSS button. Click on that, and you will be taken to a similar results list, but with an rss address in the subject line. Subscribe to that. I put that link in my Safari or Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and it constantly updates itself, showing the number of news items on that subject that I have not read. Click to read. Easy. I know all the bad news fast!
I do the same thing to follow new posts on this blog and on bastinptc.
ReplyDelete