Bookmakers betting

Does an industry that cannot service it's clients,by providing betting after 11am on a race day,deserve the protection of the gambling board?

we badly need a betting exchange in this country,interbet in theory is brilliant but it gets zero support from the bookies who belong to it ...listening to dean finders crap on saturday morning the time for an exchange has never been better

Did anyone else read the article in the business section of the Sunday Times re. overseas online gaming. Seems the govt. is keen to monitor these transactions. The said author is of the opinion that banks are not keen co-operate and doubts if the volumes of trade even warrant such action.

I will see if I can find it online.

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Print Reserve Bank takes gamble with online transactions
Bank Notes
Apr 25, 2010 12:12 AM | By Stuart Theobald

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Right now you can go to Partypoker.com and gamble in dollars using your credit card. It is technically illegal, because you are in effect exchanging rands for dollars in order to gamble, even if you exchange them back into rand again at the end.

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There is no simple way to tell the difference between legal and illegal dealing But there is nothing the Reserve Bank can do to stop you.

The growth in international commerce means South Africans are engaged in thousands of transactions online, from booking accommodation for their next holiday in Thailand to buying books on Amazon.

While the banks must report all such transactions to the Reserve Bank, there is no simple way to tell the difference between transactions that are legal (buying goods for rands) and illegal (online gambling).

The Reserve Bank is now trying to do something about this. It has issued a circular proposing to use the national payments system to flag and block transactions with offshore gambling websites. While the banks have not yet formally responded to the circular, there are already grumblings about the implications.

There are many conceptual problems. The first one is how you know whether the merchant that initiates a transaction is an online gambling site. The credit card companies have a basic classification system for merchants, like "accommodation" or "meals", when a transaction is processed.

But there is nothing very scientific about those classifications. If you have a meal in a hotel, you might just be charged for "accommodation". Same if you pop into the hotel's casino.

The second problem is whether or not the credit card holder is in South Africa. A transaction that is illegal for you to do from South Africa is perfectly legal for you to do when visiting Monte Carlo. The systems that process all such transactions have no easy way of telling the difference.

But the Reserve Bank is proposing that the banks come up with a way of telling the difference. That means they must construct elaborate new software to monitor and assess all transactions going through their systems. And they will need the assistance of the payment companies like Visa and Mastercard to determine just who the merchants are that initiate transactions. As with all regulation, that comes at a cost. And the banks are gearing up to argue that the costs simply are not worth it.

No one seems to know just how much South Africans gamble on offshore websites. There are countless online gambling websites offering everything from poker to sports betting. There is some legal dispute over whether the gambling itself is in violation of our gambling legislation.

A long-running legal battle between Piggs Peak Casino in Swaziland and various South African gambling regulators has yet to be resolved, with Piggs Peak arguing that its online site does not amount to gambling in South Africa and is therefore not subject to South African gambling legislation.

That's quite tricky philosophical territory - whether using a casino's website amounts to gambling in your home or gambling on the website's servers based in another jurisdiction.

And if it is about where you are sitting, there is a further problem - casinos are only licensed to operate in certain provinces, so using the website of a Gauteng-based casino from Cape Town might be illegal.

At least with Piggs Peak the gambling takes place in rand, so that one will be left to gambling regulators to sort out. But when it comes to dollar-based online gambling, the Reserve Bank wants to call a halt. I cannot imagine that the practice is all that prevalent, because there is a cost implication to the user of processing an international transaction.

So it seems fair to ask if the costs of elaborate changes to the payments processing software to try and pick up on illegal transactions are worth it, especially when it would not be too hard for the merchant to get around the prohibition by reclassifying himself.