Quote Originally Posted by Shizzmoney View Post
Wells Fargo was also one of the big banks who regularly did transactions with poker sites back in the pre-BF days. After the SDNY started to come down on payment processors, they switched course resulting in over $34 million plus of poker payments to be frozen:

On June 9th, the AP reported that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) instructed several banks, including Wells Fargo and Alliance Bank of Arizona, to freeze the accounts of payment processor Allied Systems Inc. Later reports confirmed that Citibank was also issued an order to freeze certain accounts and that a second payment processor, Account Services, was also targeted.

Online poker sites use payment processors such as Account Services to process check cash outs to players. The freezing of the accounts essentially meant that any checks (including e-checks) issued to players that were drawn on said accounts were now worthless.
http://www.parttimepoker.com/us-gove...ns-and-answers

As for this deplorable episode above, I fully expect smaller employees who were following orders (while lining their pockets) to be blamed and fired for it, and the CEO and executives (who made moeny off of the increasing stock price thanks to our tax dollars) to be summoned to the U.S. Senate to be questioned over the affair, so that the politicians will have tape of them looking like they are doing something about it. Then, after that hearing, they will all go to a BBQ place in Washington D.C. and proceed to give a nice lobbyist and government DOJ liaison circle jerk as if nothing happened.

Will anything be done about it? No: People are too busy doing shit like like some irrelevant douchebag social justice warrior because their Uber driver has a statue portraying a Polynesian person in a stereotypical light, or right wing folks decrying every progressive or leftist solution to the slowly crumbling failing ideology of modern capitalism as some socialist globalist plot (while getting in a bigoted comment about <insert race they hate here>), as the country is too polarized politically to do anything about the corporate raiding of the US, while we are distracted like a moth when it sees light, over irrelevant bullshit.
I remember when my Wells Fargo debit card was a great tool to deposit on Pokerstars. Never had to keep all that high of a bankroll there, because I could just redeposit with my Wells card (with no fees) whenever I got low.

This was true all the way up to Black Friday, while most other banks prevented processing of online gaming transactions.

Even post-Black-Friday, when the government started to pressure banks to identify customers engaging in online gambling transactions, Wells Fargo still turned a blind eye. Read 2+2, and you will see that there were tons of reports of account closures at B of A and Chase for receiving checks/wires from online poker sites, but never Wells.

Wells also took a lax stand on the "know your customer" requirement. Chase disallowed cash deposits to personal accounts by third parties, even if they showed ID. B of A required ID for such deposits. Wells happily took anonymous cash deposits to all accounts.

I have to say that I loved Wells for their lax rules regarding all of the above, but unfortunately it's also indicative of a corporate culture where short and medium term profits trumped everything.

Basically, Wells wanted you to have a lot of accounts and make a lot of transactions, and they didn't give a shit if they were bending or breaking the law to accomplish it.

Now it's all starting to make more sense.