Cake Poker says FU to US Poker ban

Official Policy Statement from the Cake Poker Team:

On Friday September 30, 2006 the 109th sitting of the US Congress passed a Port Security Bill including a rider that affected online gambling in the US. The common media description of this act called it a ‘ban on online gambling’. This is patently false. All previous attempts at passing legislation banning online gambling have failed. Instead, this act championed by Bill Frist (R -Tennessee), attempts to prohibit payments to online gambling companies from US residents via US based financial institutions.

CakePoker will not restrict access to our players from the United States. It appears that some of our competitors have decided to take this preemptive step for business reasons that are most likely related to the fact that they are publicly listed companies. In other words, they cannot be seen as doing anything that would put their shareholders in a ‘gray’ or precarious position. CakePoker N.V. is a legally licensed and privately held company in the country of Curacao, Netherlands Antilles. As a privately held company we have no such pressures placed upon us.

Further, this act still has some stages to go through and it may take up to 9 months for the US government to fully define and clarify the terms of the law and their effect on US financial institutions. If/when this act actually becomes the law, our legal department will re-evaluate our policy on CakePoker’s acceptance of payments from US based financial institutions. At worst we expect to only have to limit some of the ways we accept payments from our US players. However, as an alternative to accepting payments from US based financial institutions we have worked very hard to gain official acceptance as a legitimate business entity by some of the internet's most respected, non-US based financial institutions such as NETeller and Firepay.

Needless to say there will continue to be a lot of confusion and misinformation spread in the near future as online gambling companies, players and even US lawmakers try to interpret the terms of the act.

Once again, our official position is that the passing of the Port Security Bill does not currently affect us or our valued, loyal players in any way. Our operations have always been 100% legal under Curacao law and comply with all the jurisdictions in which we carry out our operations.

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