All bets are off for online gambling after Congress passed a bill restricting banks and credit card companies from sending payments outside U.S jurisdiction Sept. 30.
While in the past gambling laws were controlled by individual states, the ambiguity over jurisdiction opened the door to federal regulation.
This legislation sounds the death knoll for American online gambling because most of the websites transfer money to offshore accounts.
The bill, added onto unrelated port security legislation, makes it temporarily impossible for U.S poker players to cash in on gambling earnings.
The legislation is expected to be signed into law by President George W. Bush today. But it has already caused billions of dollars in losses for huge overseas poker sites as well as heartache for die-hard Internet gamblers.
An Oct. 12 Reuters article reported online gaming shares have lost $7 billion and that many foreign gambling companies are pulling out of the United States entirely.
And while gambling websites aren’t likely to fold as a result of the ban because they are open to players worldwide, at least the legislation will prevent illegal and underage gambling from continuing here in the United States.
In the high stakes world of Internet gambling, underage people are most vulnerable to falling into debt.
In fact, the Boston Globe reported that young men have become especially addicted to gambling.
“The number of male college students who say they gamble online regularly has quadrupled since 2000,” according to the article. “Worldwide it is a $12 billion-a-year industry, and nearly half of it comes from the United States — where it isn’t legal.”
We often hear stories of college students making thousands of dollars on these sites, but it is inevitable that many of them are, in fact, losing money.
One of the biggest reasons gambling among young people has thrived is because financial risks are easy to ignore until it’s too late.
Online, money loses its tangibility. Instead of physically seeing poker chips or cash fall from their hands, players just see a number decrease in an online bank account.
And while websites do require positive identification for gamblers to make wagers, kids have avoided it by using their parents’ or older siblings’ social security numbers and licenses to create accounts.
Gambling is a societal hazard that promotes addiction and crime. But when it exists in the real world — in the form of casinos and slot machines — it can be regulated.
In an editorial earlier this week, The Daily Free Press encouraged lawmakers to consider allowing casinos and slot machines to operate in the state. This was because real-world gambling would create revenue for the state that could be invested in schools, health care and other social services. But online-casino profits are hard to track and even harder to tax.
It was only a matter of time before the sites shut down.
So now gamblers are helplessly left to watch their money frozen in foreign accounts until they can find a way to cash in. For the sake of preventing cyber phenomenon of online gambling addiction from growing into a major, real-life problem, it is vital that it stays this way.
