Visa, Mastercard Shut Door to Geermany-Facing Online Casinos

Online casinos targeting German customers will no longer be able to use Visa or Mastercard’s services as the German government has unleashed a new wave of restrictive measures aimed at the iGaming sector and at payment processors moving money to and from online casinos.

Earlier this week, local news outlet NDR reported that Visa has told German banks not process deposits to and withdrawals from online casinos that use its cards.

A spokesperson for the financial services giant said that the company has recently reached out to its retail banking partners to ensure that “only legal, properly licensed transactions are processed” using its credit cards.

It has also emerged recently that German online casino players have been unable to use their Mastercard credit cards to deposit money and withdraw their winnings from gaming websites. Casinos generally responded that Visa and Mastercard had told them to either remove the two companies from their lists of available payment options in Germany or lose access to Visa and Mastercards in all markets they operate.

Issue Not Uniform

NDR noted in its report from earlier this week that the issue is not uniform for all Germany-facing online gambling operators. For instance, German operator Tipico has removed Visa entirely from its platform, while GVC Holdings brand bwin has told its local customers that they can continue using their Visa cards to make sports betting deposits only.

Meanwhile, NDR stated that its own attempts to fund accounts with both Tipico and bwin were successful. Spokesmen for the two operators told the local news outlet that Germany’s current gambling law, which prohibits online casino-style gaming, was too restrictive and completely incompatible with EU directives.

War on Payment Processors Rages On

Last month, Germany’s state of Lower Saxony warned an unnamed payment service provider to refrain from processing transactions related to illegal online gambling, that is to say to casino websites.

The state issued a similar warning last summer, yet again to an unnamed payments firm, which local media widely believed to be PayPal as the company announced shortly after that warning that it was shutting down its services to German online casino players.

Lower Saxony’s Minister of Interior and Sports, Boris Pistorius, told payment service providers last month that they are “legally obliged to refrain from making payments in connection with illegal gambling” and urged them to “critically review and, if necessary, immediately stop working with companies that practice illegal gambling.”

Earlier in 2020, Minister Pistorius sent a letter to the country’s banking sector urging financial institutions to stop processing illegal gambling money.

Online casino and poker activities are currently prohibited in Germany under the country’s Third State Treaty on Gambling, which took effect early this year as a temporary framework that is set to be replaced by a permanent law in mid-2021. That permanent law will allow licensed gambling companies to conduct online casino and poker activities on the territory of Germany.

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