Poker News

Visa Follows MasterCard’s Lead & Stops Processing Online Gambling Transactions

It’s been a tough new year for online poker players in the United States. This was suppose to be the year where the USA would possibly start regulating the game and therefore making it legal to play, but that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon. It wasn’t that long ago that we told all of you that MasterCard was no longer going to process online gambling transactions for players living in the United States.

Now this week, Visa has released a statement stating that they will also stop accepting payments for online gambling from anyone that lives in the United States. The reason why both of these companies have started the process of not accepting online gambling transactions is because the UIGEA will start being enforced starting in June. With only a couple moths until June these massive credit card companies needed to make sure they were protecting themselves.

I wouldn’t expect MasterCard or Visa to be a deposit option for US players until poker becomes regulated in the country. Until then you’re going to need to find an alternative deposit method. There are lots of e-wallet services out there that you can use. All you need to do is fund your e-wallet using a credit card or debit card and then you’ll be able to fund your online poker account using the funds from your e-wallet account.

Visa is the most popular credit card processor in the USA so this is definitely going to pose a problem for thousands of players, but it can be easily fixed. It might be a pain initially setting up an e-wallet account as it can take a few days to approve, but once it’s done you can fund your account anytime you’d like and it’s instant 99% of the time.

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