Funding online poker accounts is a pain

Is online poker rigged? I doubt it, but who knows, really? This I do know, however: It is a royal pain in the butt to put money into an online poker site.

I haven't had occasion to do that in a long time, because I just don't play online much. But last week I learned that a site I like a lot (and keep referring to, in case you hadn't noticed), http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, was having a private tournament on Full Tilt Poker tonight. I wanted to participate, because it's people I chat with often. The tournament was only $5.50--surely I had that much sitting in my FTP account, right? Nope. The cashier said I had exactly $0.01. Hmmm. I don't think that will cut it.

NetTeller used to be so slick. Once it was set up, click-click-click, money in from your checking account and zapped to the poker site in mere seconds, or back again when cashing out, all for free. *sigh* Those were the days, my friend.

No more. The nasty, stupid, detestable bill that Congress put through last year made NetTeller scared to death, and they stopped accepting business from U.S. addresses. Now we're left with all of the expensive, awkward, clunky, difficult-to-use, exasperating alternatives.

epassporte

I first tried my epassporte account. I've had this for years, and it has worked fine, except that they steal 5% of what I want to send to an online site. Fine, I'll pay their ransom this once, I thought. But I tried it several times from the FTP software, and it wouldn't go through, and wouldn't explain why. So I logged onto http://www.epassporte.com/ and found a cheery message telling me that my account had been placed into some sort of security-review hold status. So I sent their customer service center an email asking, y'know, WTF? This was six days ago. As of today, no response. So, getting desperate as the hour of the tournament approached, I called them. Got put on hold for almost 30 minutes. Finally the person at the other end confirmed what that cheery message said about my account, but couldn't tell me anything about why or what it meant or what had to be done to fix it. She promised to pass the problem on.

Well, at least they were quick about it. Within about half an hour I had an email telling me to check my messages at the epassporte site. I did, and it told me they needed more documents to verify the account. I'm guessing this is because I moved from Minnesota to Nevada since the last time I used their service, so something in my bank account routing number had changed, or maybe a public-records database search found the change in driver's license. Whatever. They needed me to scan my Nevada DL and latest bank statement and email them back. So I did. Now they tell me that they'll have somebody review those documents real soon. Yeah. Right. Just as fast as you nimrods reply to your customer-service emails, I'll bet.

GatorPay

Plan B: Last week when I couldn't put through an epassporte transaction, the FTP site suggested that I try their newest funding option, something called "GatorPay." Officially what one does at GatorPay is buy long-distance telephone charge cards. But from what I can tell, it's largely a sort of back-door way of funding online gambling, because, unlike most phone card systems, this one will let you authorize a vendor to take money off of your prepaid card. You can see how that would be handy.

So I slog through the page after page of information that they need to set up an account, including a bunch of security questions. The last step is that their computer has to call my home phone number to verify that it works. Well, that's a problem. You see, I live in a stupid apartment complex with a stupid 1970s vintage phone system that has one stupid phone number for everybody; you have to dial a stupid extension for a specific apartment after the stupid switchboard answers at the stupid main number. This is frequently a problem online, because the stupid forms almost never give you enough space to add in the stupid "extension." GatorPay's did let me put in the stupid digits, but I was confident that their stupid computer would disregard them and couldn't handle the extra business about waiting for an answer, then punching in a stupid three-digit extension. Sure enough, the verification call that I needed in order to complete setting up the account never came through.

So I called GatorPay's customer service and explained the problem. The guy was very understanding and said that it was no problem, he could call the number manually and do the verification. Well, at least he usually could, but not right then, because their whole system had crashed. I checked in a couple more times over the next few hours, and the web site was down, too. This does not inspire confidence in the technology to which one is giving access to one's bank account.

I kind of forgot about the whole thing until today. While I was waiting for epassporte's response this afternoon, I tried GatorPay again. I couldn't log onto their system because it said it had no such account. Hmmm. Well, maybe when the verification step never occurred I got deleted after a day or two, for security reasons. That would make sense. So I tried to create a new account. But after the first page of data, the system told me, "It appears that you already have an account with us." So I tried logging in again, and it wouldn't let me. I tried the "forgot my password" option, in case maybe I had typed it wrong, and that seemed to be a dead link that didn't do squat.

I called customer service and related the whole sorry tale. Predictably, they had nothing about me in their system. The guy assured me that I had no account there and it would be no problem to set one up from scratch. He didn't seem to grasp that I had just tried that, and had hit an electronic brick wall, because the system did, in fact, recognize me. This is where he started grasping at straws. He asked me if I had had accounts at other online gambling funding sites. Well, yeah, NetTeller, and a couple of others that I used to use when I was in Minnesota and brick-and-mortar casinos were few and far between. He said that was the reason, that I wouldn't be able to set up a GatorPay account, because their system recognized me from my business with those other sites.

Now, this makes absolutely no sense. First, I doubt that they can actually gain access to those other businesses. (Unless, that is, GatorPay is secretly associated with them in some way, which I kind of doubt.) Second, it would be utter lunacy to set up a business such as this that would automatically reject every potential customer that had ever dealt with their competitors. That's like Apple saying, "Sorry, you can't buy a Mac, because we see that you've owned an IBM previously." It's like Delta refusing you as a passenger because their records showed that you once flew United.

So obviously this guy is either a charlatan or a madman. Since he tells me that there is nothing more he can do, I ask to be transferred somewhere else. He sends the call to the security department. To this guy I relate the whole thing. Again. He checks, verifies that I have no account there, and tells me--wait for it--that there is no reason I can't set up an account at GatorPay. No, he has no idea why it won't let me do just that. That's not really a security matter, he oh-so-helpfully informs me. It's an IT issue. No, I can't talk to IT personally, he has to pass on a message.

Maybe I'll get an email back from somebody at GatorPay, someday. Maybe I won't. You want to place a bet on that? Well, I would take your bet, but first we have to do some background checks on you. It'll only take a few days.

A savior (which is not Christ the Lord, in this particular instance)

In the meantime, I posted a note of regret on the AVP forum, explaining my dilemma and why I wouldn't get to register in the tournament. A white knight came to my rescue and offered to transfer me a few bucks from his FTP account, somebody I don't even recall chatting with before (though presumably he recognized me from my posts). I shot him the money via PayPal, and he made the transfer on FTP. The whole thing took four emails and about three minutes. Thank you, jlindley9, whatever your real name might be! Even in this high-tech age, sometimes actual humans--even strangers--are more reliable and efficient than computers.

Oh, the tournament? I did great, just great! As per my usual lack of online prowess, I finished in 17th place. Out of 24 players. Guess I gotta keep working on that aspect of my poker game. At least now I have a little money in place to do it with, no thanks to the businesses that are allegedly set up specifically to facilitate it.