Spain is blocking withdrawals from the 28th until they check whose card it is

While there are three jurisdictions, three stated justifications, one outcome.
  • Spain: anti-money-laundering. Payment instrument must match the account holder.
  • United States: consumer credit protection, state by state, plus operator chargeback economics.
  • United Kingdom: affordability and source of funds, arrived at through the licence conditions rather than payments law.
None of them set out to reduce the number of ways you can move money in and out. All three did. The payment layer is where every regulator eventually ends up, because it is the only part of this industry that leaves a clean audit trail in somebody else's system.
 
cheers, tidy framing but I'd push back on calling it one outcome, because the three do very different things to a player.
  • Pros of the Spanish version: it closes third party deposits properly, it's a one time check, and once you're verified you're verified. It also stops the thing where someone funds an account with a partner's card and then there's a dispute about whose money it was.
  • Cons: the transition is backwards. Holding winnings while accepting deposits is the exact opposite of what you'd design if the player's interest came first, and six months is a long time to be on the wrong side of a queue.
The US card bans don't hold anybody's money. They remove an instrument, and a bad one. The UK affordability route is the only one of the three that actually asks you to justify yourself as a person rather than prove a card is yours. Lumping them together makes the Spanish one sound milder than it is.
 
Accepted on the distinction. The mechanisms differ and the Spanish transitional provision is worse than the others in its effect on a customer. But my point was narrower: the payment layer is the common target, whatever the stated reason. Your correction on what each one costs the player stands.
 
one question that nobody answer me anywhere. my card is from an account that is of me and my wife together, the two names
so is this my card or not my card for this law
 
Can't argue that's a good question and I don't have an answer for you. The decree says the holder of the payment method has to be the person registered to the account. It doesn't address joint instruments anywhere I can find, and I've read Article 21 three times now looking for it. My guess is it comes down to whose name is embossed on the card rather than who's on the underlying account, but that is a guess and I won't dress it as anything else.
Ask your operator in writing and keep the reply. If they get it wrong, written answer from them is useful to have

BR, Sapit
 
Mine is a single account so I cant help. But half the married people in this country are going to hit the same wall in six months and nobody has written one word about it.
 
my bf had a version of this on a uk site last year, card in his mum's name from when she lent it to him once years back. took weeks to untangle and they wouldn't pay out until it was sorted. it wasn't even the card he was using at the time
 
Textbook, and it's always a historic card. One sitting on the account from years ago and it stays there as a flag until somebody looks.
 
@v1t@l while you're in there, check what else is saved on the account and remove anything that isn't yours and current. The check runs against your payment methods, not just the one you're using today.
 
Well I have VIP contacts at a couple of the groups operating in Spain. DM me if the verification stalls and I'll see what can be done from the inside.
 
With respect, nobody should be taking that route on this one. The verification under Article 21 is a documented compliance check that gets recorded and reported to the DGOJ. A VIP manager cannot shortcut it and shouldn't try, and an account where somebody tried is a worse-looking account afterwards than one that just sat in the queue.
Submit the documents, keep the timestamps, escalate in writing if they sit on it. That's the whole playbook here.

BR, Sapit
 
better listen to sapit. i spent ten days chasing a withdrawal at reef reels and the only thing that moved it was having every date written down when i escalated. after all i received my money but it was documentation that did it not favours
 
bit of the spanish thing that interests me is the asymmetry and i don't think its an accident. if you wanted to stop third party money going in, you'd block deposits until verified. that's the obvious design. instead they've left deposits open and shut withdrawals, which protects the operator's volume for six months and puts the whole cost of the transition on the customer
maybe that's just how the drafting fell out. but somebody read that provision before it went in the boe and didn't flag it
 
That's the sharpest point in the thread and I'll give you the compliance-side reading of it, which isn't a defence so much as an explanation.
Blocking deposits on day one means every existing customer in the market is locked out of a live account until an operator processes them. That's a market-wide outage with the operator holding your money and you unable to do anything. Blocking withdrawals instead keeps the account functional while the backlog clears.
From inside a compliance function that looks like the lesser disruption. From where @v1t@l is sitting it looks like they kept the till open and locked the safe. Both of those are accurate descriptions of the same provision.
What I'd want to know, and can't find, is how many accounts this touches. Nobody has published a number.

BR, Sapit
 
Is there any reporting on the number at all? I've looked at four write-ups of this and none of them give one. Also worth asking what counts as a "winning" during the hold. If you deposit 100 and the balance goes to 150, is the whole 150 held or only the 50?
 
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