No more MasterCard payments for American online gamblers

In the early 2000s MasterCard, Visa and several American banks that issued MasterCard and Visa credit cards had been accused in class actions in at least ten US states of helping along payments to the offshore gambling industry in violation of US federal and state laws.
Back then MasterCard and Visa started stopping gambling transactions, but it didn't take long for companies providing payment services to the online gambling industry to figure a way to remove the code identifying the transactions as gambling to continue take credit card deposits on behalf of online gambling sites.
While it is not clear what caused MasterCard to crack down on online gambling transactions this week and unconfirmed reports point to the credit card company taking action in anticipation of UIGEA being enforced later this year, it is BMR opinion that the federal case against Canadian Douglas Rennick and his group of companies that provided payments to many online gambling sites active on the US market, provided all the information MasterCard needed to figure out how gambling payments were uncoded and then masked as payments for other products/services.
But this is not the first time that MasterCard blocks US gambling payments in such large scale. It will be interesting to see whether online payment providers will be able to find a new way around it.

UPDATE 06-02-2010: Visa appears to have followed suit as some US players reported to have had their transactions blocked on at least 3 different online gambling sites.

Date published: 05 February 2010

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