Issue N30, 2007
August 1, 2007
Neteller to Finally Start Paying Back Frozen Funds
After finally reaching an agreement with the United States Department of Justice, the ebanking company Neteller announced this week that it was beginning the process of paying back funds to U.S. customers who have had their money frozen since January of this year. With $94-million needed to be transferred back, the process is not expected to take overnight, however Neteller will most likely deal with the hundreds of thousands of applications – mostly by online gamblers - as quickly as possible. Customers who need their money transferred by electronic money payment will be happy to note that the money should appear in their bank accounts by the end of next week. This is good news for gamblers who despaired of ever seeing their money again, despite continuous assurances by Neteller that it was only a matter of time until the matter was resolved with the authorities.
Neteller began trading on the London Stock Exchange again after a six-month absence. After the arrest of its two co-founders John Lefebvre and Stephen Lawrence in January, the company voluntarily suspended its shares, leaving many shareholders frustrated and uncertain about the future of their investments. The company expects to make a strong comeback in the industry and has already announced that it will be a prime sponsor for the European iGaming Congress and Expo due to take place in the near future. Most of Neteller’s business came from serving the online gambling industry, especially in the United States.
Sportingbet Sued for Copyright Infringement
The British sportsbetting and online gambling casino site, Sportingbet is being sued by an American company, RotoPlay for alleged acts of copyright infringement and unfair competition. The President of RotoPlay, Korey Gardner accused in a statement this week that after Sportingbet negotiated with his company for months regarding licensing some of their games, the online casino group decided to go ahead and ‘steal’ the games. RotoPlay claims that two games that are offered as originals on Sportingbet’s sites, namely Baseball Lottery and Football Lottery, are in fact games created by them. “Sportingbet copied all of our lottery games, unique scoring system, game rules, HTML code and tie-breaker information verbatim,” said Gardner.
Golden Palace Buys Next Strange Purchase
The online casino group, Golden Palace is famous in the industry for some the weirdest items to be purchased in history. The company’s marketing people regularly scour eBay and other sites to see which bizarre items they can add to their ever-growing collection which includes William Shatner’s kidney stone, a pregnancy test belonging to Britney Spears and the famous Virgin Mary cheese sandwich, among others. The company regularly takes its famous collection on the road as a successful industry publicity gig.
This week the group announced that it had purchased another collector’s items – a piece of dental floss belonging to, and probably used by American heiress, socialite and ex-jailbird, Paris Hilton. The dental floss, covered with lipstick, was saved from Hilton’s trashcans by Hollywood Star Trash – a company specializing in going through the bins of the rich and famous and offering interesting finds to potential buyers. A recent YouTube clip showed exactly how the company had procured the dental floss.
Online Gambling Goes Academic
Oxford University recently announced that it was backing a new research project to study the gambling habits of online casino players in the United Kingdom, along with two other bodies – the Responsibility in Gaming Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council. The study will be the form of an online survey with links to many online gambling sites and portals. Players – and non-players – will be asked to fill in the questionnaire, which should take approximately 20 minutes to do. Two other groups that represent UK and European gambling, namely the Remote Gambling Association and the European Gaming and Betting Association, also pledged their support for the study. The designers of the study hope to gain a broader picture of the ‘implications of various patterns of online gambling’.
Payment Processor Withdraws from US Gambling Market
Since the passing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act last year, it has become a common occurrence to see online payment processing companies leave the US market due to fear of prosecution by US authorities. Neteller was the largest company to stop serving US customers in January of this year, although several others have also left because of the complicated legal situation regarding online gambling in the country. The latest company to make the move was EcoCard, a company that has been involved in online banking since 2000. In a statement to their US based customers, Ecocard said: “In the light of recent industry developments EcoCard has decided it will no longer process any payment transactions originating from US located customers that may be related to internet gambling.”