Uigea

ON SECOND THOUGHT — WHAT DOES THE UIGEA REALLY MEAN FOR INTERNET GAMBLING? The online gambling industry apparently decided that the United States Congress enacted a blanket prohibition on Internet gambling transactions when it passed the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006,” (“UIGEA”). The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, or the UIGEA for short, is a piece of federal anti-gambling legislation that prohibits financial institutions from knowingly accepting or processing payments for wagers deemed to be illegal according to federal or state law.

• UIGEA was enacted to prohibit institutions from accepting payments from any person engaged in the business of betting or wagering with a business in unlawful Internet gambling.
• Provisions of UIGEA prohibit the acceptance of payments relating to bets or wagers involving use of the Internet if those activities are unlawful under applicable law.
• UIGEA defines a 'participant' as 'an operator of a designated payment system, a financial transaction provider that is a member of or, has contracted for financial transaction services with, or is otherwise participating in, a designated payment system, or a third-party processor.' The term 'participant' does not include a participant's customer unless the customer is also a financial transaction provider participating on its own behalf in the designated payment system.
• A joint rule issued by the U.S. Department of the Treasury (31CFR 132) and the Federal Reserve Board (12 CFR Part 233 – Regulation GG) states that the following five payment systems are covered by UIGEA: automated clearing house systems, card systems, check collection systems, money-transmitting businesses, and wire transfer systems.
• Financial institutions should develop and implement policies and procedures, as appropriate, to ensure that transactions of this nature are not accepted.
• Attached are an overview of UIGEA, a chart identifying the designated payment systems and requirements of participants, and examination procedures related to this rule.
• Compliance with the rule was required as of June 1, 2010.

Distribution:
FDIC-Supervised Banks (Commercial and Savings)

Suggested Routing:
Chief Executive Officer
BSA Compliance Office

Related Topics:
Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering (BSA/AML) Programs

Attachment:
Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act Overview and Examination Procedures - PDF (PDF Help)

Contact:
Anti-Money Laundering Specialist Marie Edwards at
SASFIL@FDIC.gov or (202) 898-3673

Printable Format:
FIL-35-2010 - PDF (PDF Help)

Note:
FDIC Financial Institution Letters (FILs) may be accessed from the FDIC's Web site at http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2010/index.html
To receive FILs electronically, please visit http://www.fdic.gov/about/subscriptions/fil.html.
Paper copies of FDIC FILs may be obtained through the FDIC's Public Information Center,
3501 N. Fairfax Drive, Room E 1002, Arlington, VA 22226 (1-877-275-3342 or 703-562-2200).

If you do any sports betting at all – or are simply researching the activity before getting started, you’ve likely come across a law called the UIGEA. What is the UIGEA? The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, or the UIGEA for short, is a piece of federal anti-gambling legislation that prohibits financial institutions from knowingly accepting or processing payments for wagers deemed to be illegal according to federal or state law. As its name suggests, the UIGEA is strictly a law relating to the enforcement of existing anti-gambling laws. Though the UIGEA is not controversial in itself, the way in which it became the law makes it one of the most controversial bills of any kind in American history and one of the most significant gaming-related laws.

Essentially, the UIGEA, also called the Leach Act after the bill’s primary sponsor, Representative Jim Leach of Iowa (R), was attached as a rider to the unrelated Security and Accountability for Every Port Act of 2006. The SAFE Port Act, as the law is also known, primarily deals with codifying anti-terrorism initiatives that improve the security of US ports, and it was seen as a piece of must-pass legislation by the 109th Congress. Thus, legislators in favor of the UIGEA seized on the opportunity. In an 11th-hour vote, the SAFE Port Act passed by a margin of 409-2 in the House and a unanimously in the Senate, although no further legislative review of the bill was conducted, meaning many lawmakers did not even know the UIGEA language was included.

President George W. Bush signed the SAFE Port Act – and the UIGEA along with it – into law on October 13, 2006. The passage of the UIGEA had major repercussions for the Internet gambling market and still does to this day, but to better understand its significance and how it affects legal sports betting, we must first dig a little deeper into the background of the law.

The Controversial History Of The UIGEA

The UIGEA came into being after the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in 2002 that the Interstate Wire Act, which prohibits the use of electronic transmission of sports betting information and bans oddsmakers from offering or accepting wagers on sporting events across state lines, did not actually prohibit all forms of Internet gambling. The Wire Act – very much a product of its time (being conceived of in the late 1950s and put into effect soon afterward), was devised as a means of cutting off one of organized crime’s most lucrative revenue streams: sports betting rackets and match-fixing. In this regard, the Wire Act was an arguable success, even if it was eventually superseded by progressively more effectual laws and enforcement tools like the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO Act, in the 1970s.

As discussed above, the UIGEA was passed the day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections, with legislators hurrying off to their reelection campaigns. According to senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), one of the bill’s opponents, no one in the Senate-House Conference Committee, which approved tacking the UIGEA onto the SAFE Port Act, had ever seen the final language of the bill before the vote was called. In this way, the UIGEA was attached to the decidedly noncontroversial SAFE Port Act, which was in turn signed into law by president Bush two weeks later. So what is the UIGEA? Even its supporters don’t really know. (In retrospect, perhaps the ignorant and hasty passage of the UIGEA isn’t as unusual in practice as it seems. In the time since, plenty of lazy congresspersons have admitted that in order to find out what is in a bill, it is common practice to first get the bill signed into law.)

The UIGEA’s Effect On Legal Sports Betting

The UIGEA’s effect on legal sports betting – at least at first – cannot be understated. Initially, the passage of the UIGEA sent a shockwave through the online gambling industry, and sports betting was no exception. At the time the UIGEA became the law of the land, almost all foreign-based online gaming companies, which heretofore had been completely unaffected by either the Wire Act or the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), allowed US bettors to wager on table games and sporting events alike. However, after the UIGEA went into effect, the offshore websites that offered services to the US market immediately began looking for a loophole or workaround, and many stopped accepting action from American bettors within days after passage (though this proved to be very temporary in most cases).

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In the immediate aftermath of the UIGEA, gambling websites that chose to remain in the US market faced an uphill battle to remain in the black, and many – primarily poker sites that stopped offering real-money bets – never recovered from the damage done by the UIGEA. Publicly traded companies with online poker action, finding themselves banned in America, turned the tables and starting banning American players, which drove down their web traffic substantially. Some websites had to cease operations immediately while others saw the almost industry-wide pullout as a chance to abscond with the money still sitting in player accounts.

Sports betting websites also left the US market, never to return, but others – like Bovada, MyBookie, BetOnline, and a few more top brands – are still going strong and continue to grow more than 10 years after the passage of the UIGEA. The biggest difference for these and other companies still serving US bettors is the reduction in payment processing options and the channeling of funds into markets that the US government cannot control. Since the UIGEA specifically targeted companies accepting payment for bets over the Internet, banks and credit card processing firms were forced to limit their “knowing” involvement in facilitating these transactions.

The short-term vacuum created by the absence of payment processors led to the rise in prominence of e-wallet services, but those also eventually abandoned the market after several high-profile cease-and-desist cases from the federal government (and the results of sting operations aimed at catching UIGEA violators, which came to a head during 2011’s notorious Black Friday, which shut down all of the biggest US online poker vendors). Nowadays, the remaining online gambling websites that serve the US prefer to send players their winnings through wire transfer services like Western Union, through money orders, and especially via cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and other altcoins (Litecoin, Ethereum, etc.).

How Does The UIGEA Affect Daily Fantasy Sports?

Fortunately for players of DFS contests, the UIGEA does not affect daily fantasy sports or DFS fans’ ability to enjoy their pastime and win some money too, at least in the states with DFS support. Unless expressly prohibited in individual states that classify DFS as a game of chance and not a game of skill (i.e. “gambling”), the DFS industry operates under a loophole in the UIGEA. DFS contests are exempt from the UIGEA’s prohibitions because DFS does not award prizes based on the number of participants or the number of fees paid by entrants, and also because DFS contests don’t involve the currently fixed rosters of actual sports teams.

Owing to this loophole, the DFS industry, by and large, uses the UIGEA as a defense that its contests are not one and the same as sports betting, although some states have made moves to classify them as such. At the same time, the UIGEA contains language specifically saying that no part of the law can be construed as altering or limiting any other federal or state law (or even tribal-state gaming compacts) that relate to gambling regulation. Ultimately, the UIGEA’s provision that allows DFS as a game of “relative knowledge and skill” leaves the decision up to the individual states as to whether fantasy contests count as gambling.

Will The UIGEA Ever Be Overturned Or Repealed?

With how shady the UIGEA was passed into law, it would not be surprising if it is eventually brought to the Senate floor and repealed. With the growing popularity of sports betting, it is not out of the realm of possibility that sports bettors will begin to protest the laws as they will want more convenient methods to deposit into their betting accounts. If sports betting is regulated, then there should not be a law that prohibits legal sports bettors from partaking in the act. One thing that may work in the UIGEA’s favor in staying an active law, is individual states that don’t want to cede autonomy over sports betting by giving players more freedom in where they bet. Due to this, it is far more likely that the law will continue to remain on the law books.

The UIGEA And Bitcoin

The main reason that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act is irrelevant today is that it really doesn’t prevent anything now that the betting community has largely moved on from funding their offshore sportsbook accounts with credit cards and cashier’s checks. With the advent of cryptocurrency, all it takes to understand the future of this law is to inspect the relationship between the UIGEA and Bitcoin. There are those, in fact, who argue that the former directly led to the creation of the latter, which was designed to be a quantum-hacking resistant, bankless form of global currency. The notion, while squarely in the realm of “conspiracy theory,” is not unfounded, but regardless of the veracity of the claim, Bitcoin has become the de facto funding choice for sports bettors all over America in 2021.

The UIGEA can’t touch Bitcoin transactions, nor can any other law currently on US books. Additionally, Bitcoin is by far the best way to collect your sportsbook winnings, as transfers take hours at most (instead of days at least). So in the face of obsolescence, what is the UIGEA really? It’s an archaic, shortsighted law that has no bearing on sports bettors in any functional way, perhaps short of driving them more quickly to the Bitcoin/cryptocurrency future of finance. Ultimately, in a gambit to control the flow of currency away from activities it deemed unwanted, the US government has simply accelerated adoption of a platform that has the potential to wrest the purse strings away from the power brokers altogether.

Does The UIGEA Make Sports Betting Illegal?

Although the words unlawful internet gambling is in the name, the UIGEA does not actually outright prohibit online sports betting. The reason for this is because federal laws have no jurisdiction outside of the United States, so there is no reason for sites like Bovada to close up shop due to this law. However, it does make it more difficult for bettors in the US to deposit and withdraw their winnings from online offshore sportsbooks. But as we have said before, our recommended online offshore sportsbooks have alternative payment options to help go around the UIGEA.

How Does The Repeal Of PASPA Affect The UIGEA?

Although PASPA has been removed and sports betting is now becoming legal in multiple states, the UIGEA remains largely unaffected. The UIGEA actually does not affect sportsbooks that are based within the United States. It is online offshore sportsbooks that remain affected by the UIGEA. But as we have said, our recommended online offshore sportsbooks know exactly how to get around this issue. You can use cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to make wagers on your favorite teams while on the other hand, US-based sportsbooks do not accept cryptocurrencies as payment.

How Effective Is The UIGEA Actually?

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It depends on what exactly you are looking for. When the UIGEA was first introduced, it was 2006 and many online sportsbooks had to flee the US sports betting market due to that. On the other hand, many online offshore sportsbooks have figured out alternative banking methods, such as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, so they can continue accepting bets from the United States. After a decade of the UIGEA, online offshore sportsbooks are still thriving and sports betting is becoming legal throughout the country. With how much the internet has evolved since 2006, the UIGEA is increasingly becoming useless and offshore sportsbooks are figuring out how to legally get around this issue.