AFAIK, unemployment compensation is a join agreement between your place of employment and the state you live in. Half of the compensation comes from what you and/or your employer has paid into the system. The amount of that compensation is based on what your tax return said you made and what your employer reports that you made. If you filed as self-employed and never paid into the unemployment system of your state during that time, then you have no unemployment compensation due.

^ This is quite naive (and wrong; as others have noted this is a representative republic, not a democracy). Hopefully you were being sarcastic.

Anyways, it's fairly obvious that politicians' incentives are pretty broken, major and minor injustices can persist for generations despite supposed "will of the people", and the long-term trend is toward more government control over the individual, not less.

Best we can hope for is waiting for a new congress to take up new poker-legislation. This is several years away.

The problem is poker very well could be covered by the UIGEA and/or many other state a federal laws. I think it would hard for the PPA to bring a case, the PPA may not have standing. The sites will have to be the one to fight this.

Does the forum have any thoughts as to whether other nations will be willing to extradite Black Friday defendants to the U.S.

Obviously the gambling charges are a non-starter, but bank fraud is a crime of some sort everywhere so those charges might be problematic for the defendants.

It is my understanding that when a credit card charge is requested there is an accompanying code that identifies the type of charge. In 2001 credit card companies made a code for gambling and voluntarily stopped taking charges from gambling sites, well before 2006. I just successfully deposited a small amount of money on Bodog, using the same credit card that had previously been refused at Full Tilt and Pokerstars in the past. The name on the charge is not Bodog. Providing a false code would be a violation of those same laws concerning bank fraud.
Maybe I'm cynical, but it seems suspicious to me that Harry Reid tried to pass an internet poker law that provided for an 18 month internet poker "blackout" at the behest of the big Nevada casino companies but that attempt failed. Now, a few months later, there is a defacto "blackout" and probable permanent shut down of what would have been the casinos largest competitors. I expect we will soon see legalization of internet poker but only for new websites controlled by those same casino companies.

Ok, I will ask this question very simply. Why is it legal for Bodog and Carbon to accept payments and deposits from US customers? If it is legal for them, then it surely must be legal for all other sites? They wouldn't have committed these banking frauds had they been allowed to accept deposits and withdrawals via Neteller.

Why is it legal to play on Bodog for US citizens? The companies are clearly violating the UIGEA law.

I love your cynicism-but its not cynical- its TOTALLY TRUE. They will get online poker regulated and the US casinos will capitalize on this in a BIG WAY- its unbelievable....

Nope, the major complaint in the microgaming case was that they didn;t have a requirement for their licensees to hold player funds seprately like mot sites do.

It's legal to play on all the sites (except in some places like Washington state) . Operating the sites in the US and transfering money is not legal, at least according to the government. That's not legal for Bodog or Carbon either.

According to one news report, the government has an informer that can implicate Stars, FTP and AP in bank fraud. Maybe that's why they went after them and not the others.

I cannot play on FTP nor PS. I can still play on Bodog.com. What other sites are still friendly to the USA?

"Operating the sites in the US and transferring money is not legal"... This is my point- Bodog and Carbon are doing precisely that. Thats not legal... why are they not shut down? Answer me this please. Having an informer shouldn't make a difference. Its clear that US customers are transferring money to the sites- its crystal clear- you don't need an informant for that

It is an open question whether an online poker site violates the UIGEA or any other valid federal or state law.

The PPA may not have standing, but this indictment could have given it standing. Or it could start a case with a small poker room or network or even a payment processor.

I'm not sure that Cereus, PS or FTP will fight Friday's criminal indictment or civil complaint. Most defendants may never appear before the court. Moreover, the biggest part of both cases involve bank and credit card fraud; not operating an illegal gambling operation. These sites acted like criminals. They should have sued for a declaratory judgment that online is legal and not engaged in schemes to hide themselves while dealing with US banks.

The UK has previously refused to extradite its resident site operators on gambling charges. Few countries will extradite for that reason IMHO.

And since the money-laundering charges are directly tied to the gambling charges, I don't think that will make much of a difference.

The bank fraud charges are more problematic, but it is still up to the foreign country (thankfully not the DOJ) to decide whether this SPECIFIC allegation of bank fraud is an extraditable offense.

Comment beyond that would have to be specific to the country from which extradition is sought.

Skallagrim

I agree. Someone can start a small room with the intention of allowing US citizens in certain states (legal states) play. The declaratory action would ask a judge to determine whether the UIEGA would restict player/bank transfers. I'm not an expert on declaratory actions but I'd at least like to hear what the PPA has to say about this.

Skallagrim.. I enjoy reading all of your posts. I'm curious as to how you are so knowledgeable on these topics and how you get your information. Are you an attorney or what do you do for a living?

Thanks for all of the awesome input you keep providing us with!

Any site that is accepting real money play from American players is breaking the law. They use the same methods that stars/ftp did. The only reason they are not shut down is because the DOJ does not have enough evidence to stop them. They did not have enough evidence against stars and tilt until Daniel Tzvetkoff gave it to them. He only gave the feds info on the 3 sites so that's who they targeted.

It will depend on the country the DOJ is trying to extradite from however in most of Europe it will be very difficult to extradite someone even on the bank fraud charges. For example if it were a French citizen in France then forget it - they won't extradite theit own citizens.

Even if the DOJ doesn't face that hurdle their other problem is that European courts have different criminal standards when it comes to bank fraud. In most of Europe for a banking transaction to be considered criminal one of two elements must be present:

1) The transaction actually defrauded some person or entity.

2) The transaction was intended to conceal some other activity that under the laws of the country the DOJ is seeking extradition from would be considered criminal.

Since banks are just the custodians for other peoples' money, concealing the otherwise legal nature of a transaction from a bank is not in itself criminal in most of Europe. Since nobody was defrauded in these transactions (they were consensual) and since the activities these transactions concealed are not themselves crimes in the eyes of a European court they would likely rule a crime was not commited under their laws, and without that there can be no extradition.

I am not a lawyer so I can't claim to know, but is it bank fraud to transfer money to a legally incorporated foreign third party that is legally seperate from any gambling operation? If that foreign offshore third party then transfers money to a foreign offshore gambling operation is it not outside the jurisdiction of US law? Just asking.

Please make a sticky for factual information updates.

You guys did this for the the Reid Bill drama and it was very useful for us who wanted to follow the story but not wade through a sea of panic posts.

My sentiment exactly.

Skall is a lawyer. He volunteers his legal services for the PPA. We should all love him for this.

Further to my earlier post - even if some foreign court did rule the banking transactions violated their criminal laws, they would probably still refuse to extradite if the defendant was facing 40 or 50 years in federal prison on the whack of other charges that are not crimes outside the U.S. That sort of punishment would be deemed grossly disproportionate compared to the sentence the defendant would likely face for this sort bank fraud in most countries.

In that case, the host country would probably offer to prosecute the defendant on the bank fraud charges under their own laws.

The DOJ is not known for trusting other countries' justice systems in that way, but what would happen to the defendants if they did?

That is also an invalid point, because that poster is just wrong. The UIGEA talks about "games subject to chance." Now it is true that poker is a game of skill, intelligence, patience, and well timed aggression, basically, it is a matter of making a proper decision each time you are posed with one to make, it is also true that even the correct decision does not pay off in every single instance, however, the hand by hand decisions do not make up the game of poker. Poker comes down to sessions or more importantly, months or even careers of making it a habit of correct decisions over and over again and that is what makes up a "winning average" over a "gambling session." That is why the poker players here and everywhere are asking for a definition of the law to be passed as law and not keep relying on an "interpretation" thereof. So as I said, the UIGEA DOES NOT say that poker is illegal.

Now one argument could be made that anyone who logs onto a poker site, makes a deposit, uses that money to play poker for a short amount of time, losses or wins with it, and goes away without choosing to acquire the skill necessary to make what they just did a skill game, was gambling. BUT, that player or that activity is not what the UIGEA was meant to stop. (see below)

One could also make the argument that poker anyway but live with real cards relies on computers, therefore, the card deal can never be "random" no matter how many hands the random number generator can store, no computer can store all possible hands and deal the hand fast enough for people to play comfortably. Also, being a computer, no rng can be random, but just has the appearance of being random, because nobody can store 10,000 possible hands in their head to predict what everybody has based on their own 2 cards, therefore, all Internet poker is gambling, because it is not truly based on making the correct decision, but based on what hands and combinations are pre-programmed into the rng and always has a predetermined winner for each hand. But again, I think this comes down to losing the least amount of money when you are going to lose a hand and making the most amount of money when you are going to win a hand. In essence, making the session or the career of poker a winning set and not basing it on each hand. And making money will eventually be down to making decisions based on how others play and not the cards themselves. So I think that puts internet poker on level playing field with live poker as a game of skill.

*The UIGEA was passed with a ports and security bill. Why? Because it was meant to stop the following activity... Someone in the US wants to get money to a terrorist organization in another country. Banks have those organizations on their radar. So the person and the organization both make an account on an online gambling or poker site. The person in the US makes the deposit. That person then transfers it to to the other account. The terrorist organization withdraws that money. THAT was the 'spirit' of the law. What did the sites then do in response? They made stipulations, like the one quoted by someone earlier in this thread by quoting pokerstars withdrawal rules, that if money is transferred into your account, you cannot withdrawal it, but must use it to play. That is why the sites were not ALL prosecuted when UIGEA passed and that is why they are not ALL in trouble now. Because they followed the spirit of the law and changed their policies to reflect that. Now in this case, there was CLEAR criminal intent to subvert other laws, but the civil parts of this, which are the $3B fines, and the false criminal additions of Internet gambling, IMO will not and should not hold up in this case until or unless the UIGEA is more well defined. And even then, they could appeal that the definition (ie.: the law) did not exist when they were charged and then will probably win the appeals.