The blog everybody is writing at the moment

Well, two Canadian Hippies did the snowbird thing to exclusive U.S. Resort areas. I think next time they’ll find the Bahamas will allow them to use a more extensive wardrobe. Their current one is an orange jumpsuit. As a result, NETELLER HAS WITHDRAWN FROM SERVING U.S. CLIENTS.

A number of earlier blogs talked about the situation. One you might find useful at this point provides some links.

I tried to deposit yesterday at Bodog and was denied access based on my address. It was reported they were the first to disconnect from Neteller. It was then reported that funds in Neteller could be transferred to other sites. But, funding the account from one’s bank account would be suspended. Overnight that became untrue.

Today, I did move the funds from Neteller to my bank. That works as it did in the past. It looks like any funds sitting in your account there are as available as ever. This is good news. My concern in the link above was with their bank. Barclay Bank has a large U.S. footprint and cannot mess with the U.S. Government.

I went to click2pay.com. They want a Social Security Number. They say it is to avoid identity theft. The vast majority of Social Security Number compromises has come from the Internet. My brokerage account was compromised over a year ago. I along with thousands of their other clients was given a year’s access to real time updates of our credit information. Fortunately, nothing happened in the year. If a major broker cannot keep my info secure, I am reluctant to provide such information to a company with far less stringent standards than those the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission mandate to stock brokers.

I don’t usually keep most of my funds on a site. Just enough to play for a while. I’ve a fair amount on TonyG. PokerStars and FullTilt have some pretty modest amounts. It wouldn’t take much of a bad run to make them unusable.

The latest update from Reuters is here. You can also click on a graph for the last year of the stock. The stock has fallen from a high of just over 800p to the 176p it was trading at when halted on the London exchange.

If anybody is using one of the alternates with success and would recommend it. Would you go to our forum and share it with the readers. If you’d then put the link to the message in a comment here, it’d be appreciated.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 7:07 am and is filed under Journal, poker legislation. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.