I am a lawyer. You could try arguing that the anachronistic process this ruling sets up makes the UIGEA inapplicable to online poker.

You see, banks process deposits to internet poker sites before any money is wagered, thus the deposit occurs before any possible "illegal internet gambling" has taken place. It is the online poker site that shifts money around with each bet. The banks involvement is over with before the first wager, when money is initially deposited to the site.

The court made clear that a wager is not illegal unless there is some other law, other than the UIGEA, defining that form of gambling as illegal. In the absence of a federal prohibition against online poker, a poker bet is only illegal if it is made in a locality where online poker is illegal.

So what are banks to do? Hire a psychic to predict the geographic location their account holders will make poker bets from? Rather, since no illegal activity occurs until such bets are made from a prohibiting locality, no illegal internet gambling has occured with a mere deposit to a poker site. And as such, the UIGEA does not require banks to block deposits to such sites. The illegality of a bank's decision to allow a deposit to proceed must be resolved in the present, not made to depend on actions of a third party, yet to occur.


[...perhaps an argument like this is worth a shot if u got room in a brief]

I read the thread, and was intrigued by the overblocking clause of the UIGEA. Someone proposed that we file a lawsuit against banks who overblock, and of course we cant because of the UIGEA...but what about banks who overblock withdrawls???

A bank overblocking a withdrawl has NO reasonable expectation that this transaction is blocked by the UIGEA, because it is specifically NOT blocked (as the courts have ruled????). This negligence in overblocking should be easily made into a tort suit (or so my non-educated self would think)...hit a bank with enough punatitive damages from the hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars they overblocked and they very well might think twice before implementing regulations about blocking internet gambling (and they might stick to low hanging fruit instead of blocking all deposits).

anyway, my 2c (not that theyre worth all that much)

While I agree totally with your sentiments, you are missing a fundamental point in law. These are private banks. Although regulated by the government, they maintain the right to otherwise do what they want. There is not (and probably never will be) any law that REQUIRES a bank to accept your poker business. There plenty of laws against denying you business for a forbidden reason (race, religion, gender, etc...) - but playing online poker does not fit in any of those categories. There are no grounds to sue to force a bank to take and complete your business.

Where some possible relief exists, and its slim and varies from bank to bank and state to state, is if a bank refuses a transaction and that has direct costs to the customer and there is a clear contractual obligation regarding the transaction. This would be a traditional breach of contract suit as you envision. The "overblocking provision" of the UIGEA prevents a such a suit so long as the bank can claim that then blocking was a good faith effort to comply with the UIGEA.

So to have a decent case you would need a regular customer with a rather unique account contract whose deposit-to-his-account transaction was declined solely on the basis of a mis-reading of the UIGEA, and incurred some direct costs as result of a specific declined transaction.

If you find such a person, the PPA would be happy to speak with him/her about their legal rights and provide referrals to attorneys to take the case.

Skallagrim

Thanks Skallagrim for the detailed response,

Fortunately I am a Canadian citizen (although up until recently Ive lived in NYC) so I can now deal solely with Canadian banks etc, but it was just an interesting question i thought up while I was reading the thread. Someone out there most likely exists that is in such a situation-so if/when the UIGEA comes around it might be an interesting case.