Playing Poker with a credit card from HSBC?
Customers of HSBC will be charged the cash advance rate rather than the normal purchase rate from 1 February, 2007.
HSBC bank is introducing increased fees for credit card customers wishing to gamble at online casinos, poker websites, Internet bookies and through telephone betting services. From February it will be charging an increased rate of between 21.9 per cent and 27.8 per cent instead of the standard 15.9 per cent to 22.9 per cent to customers using gambling sites.
There is no uniform approach to charging for gambling across the UK credit card industry so customers could well see this as a reason to change banks. Barclaycard and Lloyds charge such spending at their lower purchase rates while MBNA and RBS/NatWest and Egg charge at the cash advance rate. In 2004, the US bank Citibank decided to stop processing any internet gambling payments at all by UK holders of its credit cards.
A spokesperson from HSBC has denied that customers who gamble using their credit cards are more likely to run up big debts and then default on them. We have not seen that as part of our customers’ behaviour,” said the HSBC spokeswoman.
Industry commentator Kishan Nielsen stated that “While just 0.8% of all UK credit card spending can be attributed to gambling payments (about £120.2bn), measures such as HSBC’s gambling fee are likely to accelerate the use of online ewallets and other payment mechanisms where transactions are more difficult to categorise”.
The team at PokerLabRat.com suggest PayPal for HSBC customers affected by this fee change. Ladbrokes Poker is the only poker room we recommend that accepts PayPal payments.
With a PayPal account you can instantly add funds to your Ladbrokes account. You can also withdraw funds back to your PayPal account subject to a delay of approximately 3 hours. PayPal is currently available to customers in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
>>To Labdbrokes Poker (based on Microgaming Poker software)
>>To a poker room review on Ladbrokes Poker
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