Wanna Bet? You Don't Need Neteller.

Earlier this month, in response to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, the payment processor Neteller announced it would no longer serve online gamblers in the U.S. Now the London-based company Seed Capital is vying for their business with YouTeller, a service it plans to launch in March. "We have no overseas branch in a NAFTA country like Neteller or Citadel, so we are not affected by US legislation," says company co-founder Florian Schweitzer. As Allyn Jaffrey Shulman notes at CardPlayer.com, American gamblers already can choose from several alternatives to Neteller, including epassporte.com and nucharge.net.

Shulman analyzes the U.S. government's case against former Neteller executives Stephen Lawrence and John Lefebvre here and here. Lawrence and Lefebvre are not charged with violating the new law, which bans the processing of payments for illegal online gambling (without specifying what kinds of online gambling are illegal), because it did not exist when they were at Neteller. Instead the Justice Department accuses them of laundering money from illegal gambling, which again begs the question of what makes online gambling (aside from sports betting, which is explicitly covered by the Wire Act) illegal.