Is Online Poker Really Illegal In The United States?
I recently read an article on our sister site Casino Affiliate Programs basically stating that there was once a time where online gambling, and by extension poker, was legal in the United States. It goes on to claim that due to recent legislation such as the passing of the Wire Act in 2002 (???) and the UIGEA in 2006, it is no longer legal.
So when I read this, I had to make this the topic of my next blog article. While there is considerable confusion about this topic in the poker playing world in general, when we see gambling writers hold such opinions, that speaks volumes about just how successful the propaganda by the U.S. government has been.
For the record, the Federal Wire Act was passed by Congress in 1961, prohibiting businesses from taking bets or wagers on sporting events when such bets were transmitted across state lines. Back in the early days of online gambling, the U.S. government maintained that this act also applied to other forms of gambling, such as casino and poker.
The United States Federal Court of Appeals ended up ruling on this, and found that the Federal Wire Act did not apply to forms of gambling other than sports betting. The only further avenue of appeal that the U.S. Department of Justice has would be to take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is believed that the reason why this hasn’t been pursued is that this case is so cut and dried, and even lay persons reading the text of the Wire Act can see that it specifically addresses sports betting.
The Dog And Pony Show Must Go On
It has been almost 10 years since this ruling, although that has done absolutely nothing to deter Federal officials from continuing to assert and maintain that the Wire Act does indeed apply to these other forms of gambling. It is clear that this has no basis in law, but their goal here has been one of spreading propaganda and misinformation. This campaign has been pretty successful by all accounts.
It’s also worth noting that the Federal Wire Act doesn’t address individuals at all here in terms of what it deems to be illegal, and the Act only pertains to businesses accepting sports bets that crosses state lines. The Federal government by the way doesn’t have jurisdiction with regard to betting within a state, as that’s solely under the domain of individual states by way of the Constitution.
So the very idea that the Wire Act makes it against the law for residents of the United States to gamble online is absolutely ridiculous, even if this legislation were found by the courts to be applicable at all to online casino and poker. It is the courts who ultimately determine the applicability of legislation, so any and all such claims are completely without merit at the present time.
The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act
In 2006, as an attempt to further this illusion, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Instead of looking to pass separate legislation, whereby there may have been difficulties encountered in getting this passed, they instead chose to include the UIGEA in the Safe Port Act, which was an anti-terrorist piece of legislation that had very broad appeal.
So the UIGEA came into being back in 2006, with great fanfare. Many poker players have never heard of the Federal Wire Act, let alone the story behind it as it pertains to the legality of online poker, although almost everyone has heard of the UIGEA, yet very few understand it.
The thinking, once again, is that the UIGEA makes it illegal for Americans to gamble online, although not surprisingly, that isn’t the case at all. What it does prohibit, clearly, is money being moved around for the purposes of online gambling, where the online gambling in question has already been found to be illegal.
So the UIGEA clearly does not make online gambling illegal in itself, nor does it pertain to individuals at all, as was the case with the Wire Act as well. That pesky Wire Act though does play a role in the UIGEA though. For the UIGEA to have legal force, once again, the gambling in question has to be illegal. So the claim is that, of course, the Wire Act makes it illegal federally, so they have pretty much built a house of cards here that can’t stand up, at least on the federal level.
So this was the basis for many online poker rooms ignoring this and claiming that they received solid legal advice that it wasn’t applicable to them. However, in the end, this was like saying that the school bully will leave them alone because it’s against the rules for the bully to beat the crap out of them.
Black Friday: The Fists Start To Fly
Black Friday had nothing to do with its basis in law, in spite of all of the rhetoric that flowed from the Department of Justice that day. If you looked at the charges, they were of course based upon allegations of the online poker companies being charged with violations of, you guessed it, the Wire Act, in combination with the UIGEA.
Never mind that this has nothing to do with reality as far as the law is concerned, as the mighty American legal machine speaketh, and they managed to get a magistrate, no less, to go along with their legal charade and obtain the indictments they were seeking.
Some of the indictments did have some actual basis in law, such as some of the shifty business that went on with some of those accused in domestic matters, such as falsifying bank records and the like. At least some of these charges were pretty trumped up though, as the charges of money laundering for instance relied on covering up funds involved in illegal activities, meaning that the online gambling itself had to be found to be illegal, which once again brings us back to the Wire Act needing to be in effect.
The Federal Battlefield Is The Wrong Venue
Not only is there no legally defensible federal legislation making it illegal for Americans to gamble online, it isn’t even in their power to make such decisions. With all the hullabaloo surrounding proposed bills by Barney Frank and others to look to overturn the UIGEA, it isn’t the UIGEA that is the problem really.
This is why I have spoken out against these bills over the years, as they can do nothing to permit online gambling, nor does the present legislation even prohibit it, at least if you count the law as having any meaning, which the Department of Justice has clearly demonstrated that they do not care at all about such matters.
It is true that they can harass online gambling companies to their heart’s content without requiring any true legal basis for their actions, and they have been very effective to say the least lately. This doesn’t make online poker legal or illegal though, and in order for this to ever happen, it must be done at the state level.
So we have made some progress here, although the progress isn’t to make online poker legal like many think, since in most states it is already legal for all practical purposes anyway, since there is no clear and convincing legislation that makes it illegal. The goal though is to get the states to sponsor it by way of regulation, and we’ve already come pretty close in a number of instances. I think that it’s only a matter of time before we finally see some success here.