Online Russian Gambling Payment Blocking Underway

February 2, 2015 by

Russian Gambling Payment BlockingIn the online casino world, there’s a big problem when it comes to countries and other types of jurisdictions keeping out unlicensed operators. One route is to just block the unauthorized sites on the ISP level, but several problems make that a particular ineffective and unpopular solution. Other options haven’t proven to be much better, but a recent Russian gambling payment blocking scheme is another attempt to do better. While it’ll be a while before we see the long-term results of this approach, it’s looking like it will have bigger drawbacks than benefits.

How the Russian Gambling Payment Blocking Plan Works

Known as the Self-Regulatory Organization, the Russian SRO was formed near the end of 2014 to help with these efforts. The way this works is that all online gambling operators in Russia are required to register with the SRO, and the SRO’s jump includes monitoring transactions and processing payments. While this means that unlicensed operators wouldn’t be able to provide processing through the SRO, it also means that other payment options will not be available once this plan is in full effect.

One benefit for the Russian government is that it allows them to closely monitor all funds from all players and all licensed operators through the SRO. Along these lines, once everything is set up, they’re going to ask that all other payment systems in Russia stop processing transactions for companies that aren’t a part of the SRO.

Will it Work?

From a pragmatic point of view, it’s interesting to see if this is going to work. It’s not clear what penalties will be put in place for companies that continue to process transactions for companies that aren’t signed up with the SRO. It’s also not clear if they will have any real way of detecting or enforcing these policies. All in all, it could just be another attempt to snoop on what businesses and citizens are doing with extra government interference, but we’ll have to give them the benefit of the doubt for now and see what happens.

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