Edwin Williams, CEO of the Discovery Federal Credit Union offered cautious endorsement of a new law regulating Internet gambling payments when testifying before Congress today.
According to his prepared remarks before the House Financial Services Committee this afternoon, the CEO of the Reading, Pennsylvania credit union said that the current law makes CUs liable if they approve transactions with Internet gambling companies but does not give them sufficient tools to effectively block them.
"To ensure compliance with respect to blocking transactions, we rely on policies and procedures developed by the various payment card system operators-transactions that receive a certain code are blocked from payment," Williams said in his prepared remarks. "At my credit union, the number of transactions that are blocked is no more than a handful per month. This process, unfortunately, catches some false-positives-transactions which should not have been blocked because they were not illegal Internet gambling transactions, notwithstanding the code assigned by the payment card network."
CUNA backs the approach of the new law that would require firms that offer gambling over the Internet to be licensed and pay fees.
