Authorities Put a Stop To a new illegal trend

Online gambling's easy access threatens the authorities with fear of terrorist's attacks and illegal transactions happening online. The Internet has become an easy tool for committing crimes. A new bill was passed late last year targeting illicit offenders who break the law. The bill, 412-1, was formulated to ease authorities stopping and tracking of possible funds being used for terrorist's attacks.

Two top leaders of the House of Representatives, Majority Leader Richard K. Armey and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert eliminated from the money-laundering bill a provision regarding Internet gambling. The FBI and other agencies preferred to have this provision incorporated in the Money Laundering Bill because it claimed that the Mob was using these gambling sites to launder money and they were afraid terrorists might try to do this as well.

The White House has kept quiet publicly on this issue, however, administration officials joined hands with the credit card lobbyists since credit card companies pushed to strip the bill because they felt it would effect credit card use on gambling sites. Credit Card use is a primary way to gamble on line.

Money laundering up until now has been a major activity in drug trafficking.
This illegal transfer of funds through financial institutions has alerted government agencies to be more watchful of illegal transfer of funds in other criminal areas, particularly in the financing of terrorist organizations.

Because of this bill, U.S. banks will have more difficulty in dealing with some overseas banks that are not bonafide, that is, they do not have an actual office site and are not associated with known banking institutions.

Further, the U.S. banks must follow specific guidelines such as the closer monitoring of their transactions, particularly with so-called "private banking customers" who are very wealthy and with customers involved with other larger banking institutions such as Citigroup and JP Morgan-Chase. U.S. banks were pushing for wording in this bill that would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to free them from scrutiny in their dealing with overseas banks in countries that have softer laundering laws.

Paul S. Sarbanes, the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who has made considerable efforts in adopting laundering provisions, warns of the possibility of "a lot of mischief " in this legislation.