A couple of days ago we reported that the FBI had frozen or seized over $30 million dollars in the bank accounts held by payment processors linked to gaming companies. The gaming companies affected by this are PokerStars (a registered legal business located in the Isle of Man, in the British Isles) and Full Tilt, both of which are still in operation in the American market and neither of which were forced to withdraw from the US market or pay fines as PartyGaming was. This fiscal freeze has affected around 27,000 US customers of the two gaming sites.
As per the evaluation of the legal situation in the previous article, it seems that the FBI’s action won’t withstand the legal challenge that will be thrust upon its actions by the Poker Players Alliance and the gaming companies themselves. However, the move itself has shaken up shareprices for a few European internet gaming companies; namely PartyGaming, 888 Holdings and Playtech, who all saw a rise in their shareprices yesterday by a significant margin. The reason for this is because of the fear that if the US does crack down on the gaming industry within its borders, not only might the US online gamblers (estimated to provide around 50% of the global $16 billion dollar industry) turn to European providers, but European gamblers will probably return to the European providers as well.
According to Deutsche Bank analysts: “If this action is the start of a bigger move by US authorities to clamp down on those sites, then this should be materially beneficial for the next-largest providers of poker liquidity, Playtech and PartyGaming, as we would expect to see non-US players migrating away from PokerStars and Full Tilt.”
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This entry was written by Nena on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 9:36 pm and is filed under News.
