U.S. online gambling law debated, Silver Bets remains defiant

23 June, 2009

Ever since the Bush Administration’s passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006, lawmakers in individual states, US-based financial institutions, and online casinos worldwide have continuously struggled to keep all parties happy against essentially under-defined legal requirements.

Recently, at least two states – Minnesota and Kentucky – have faced challenges to the legal parameters of online gambling, while legislators in the nation’s capital are for a third time attempting to modify, amend or otherwise overturn UIGEA altogether.

While some casinos chose to respond to legal battles in Kentucky earlier this year by temporarily barring that state’s citizens from playing at their websites, some software companies (and therefore all casinos using the software) no longer accept U.S. players at all.

Against a confusing legal situation and an unfair federal act, the Silver Bets response is simple: Silver Bets Casino currently accepts U.S. players and will continue to accept U.S. players until they pry our right to do so from our cold, dead hands.

Silver Bets Casino welcomes all U.S. players, encouraging them with the casino’s huge $3300 initial deposit bonus; that’s a 100% match bonus for up to $660 once monthly for five months.

Silver Bets minister of information Jason Silver explained the online casino’s stance thusly: “What people don’t understand about UIGEA – what they’ve been purposely misinformed about – is that UIGEA doesn’t make gambling illegal. In fact, this so-called law states that financial institutions are disallowed from allowing transactions between U.S. citizens and gambling websites. This is only a violation of about three or four areas of civil rights.

“What’s funny about this,” continued Silver, “is that not only are the banks being ask to act as law enforcement officials, a great many banks are somehow still allowing deposits by players into online casinos, but almost none of them will allow a withdrawal from an online casino to the player’s credit card.”

In response to this particularly troublesome aspect of U.S. law, Silver Bets Casino has partnered up with a number of electronic payment methods, including Click2Pay, EcoCard, eWalletXpress, Moneybookers, Neteller Use My Wallet. Like Silver Bets Casino, all of these treat U.S. players they way they should be: As people with the right to entertain themselves in the privacy of their own home as they see fit.