If you need a firm case for regulation of online poker in the US, here’s an example. Over the weekend, longtime PocketFiver Mike timexMcDonald (pictured) posted on Twitter that he was having issues depositing onto America’s Cardroom, an offshore US-facing site not licensed by any state. Note that PocketFives does not recommend playing on sites like ACR, which aren’t regulated in the US but take US customers, as we feel your bankrolls could be at risk.

He called up ACR support and relayed what happened: “Deposit to @ACR_POKER failed, so I called support: ‘Tell your bank it’s for sporting goods from China. Not gambling. Sporting goods from China.'”

Later on the Twitter thread, which you can view below this paragraph, America’s Cardroom support, rather than denying the incident, responded, “We have to work with third party companies who say what we have to do on these matters. Apologies for any hustle you may had.” The ironic use of the word “hustle” was later deemed to be because of auto-correct:

A litany of responses poured in with players sharing stories of their own, including one person who said, “Mine was a clothing store in Beijing. Brings me back to pre-Black Friday when Stars showed up as golf supplies.” Another person chastised, “You can’t think of a more believable online purchase than this when asking customers to lie, ACR? Up your game.”

As other sites like Poker Update have pointed out, if online poker were regulated in the US outside of the three states where it’s currently available, depositing and withdrawing would not be problematic and require tales of Chinese sporting good purchases. In fact, in January, we reported about a new credit card code for legal US online gambling transactions.

In February, Pala CEO Jim Ryan said the aforementioned credit card codes would improve deposit success rates in New Jersey by 20% to 30% and added that the industry had, at the time, an abysmal 33% success rate.

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