As an acknowledgement of what has been made clear about the legalization of online gambling in the United States, Visa seems to be taking steps to get ready for the revolution.  New Jersey and Delaware, along with Nevada are legalized already as well as ten other states that are considering making certain forms of gambling and online lottery legal.  It’s not a surprise that Visa wants to take steps to be included in this process.  Confusing morass of federal and state laws make it difficult to tell the difference between legal and illegal gambling in a country where protectionist strategies and political decisions make a big part of this confusion.

Visa has given an indication of how it plans on tackling the differentiation problem in a current circular to parties that are interested that reminds them that there are specific online gambling transactions that are able to be legally processed and suggests a way that can potentially make this process smoother.  The 7995 code for Visa’s merchants for gambling transactions has a broad scope that takes care of almost everything from horseracing bets to lottery tickets and the company has suggested that merchants will be able to make life simpler for themselves and Visa by the registration with the merchant verification value program.

This is involving a very extensive and bureaucratic validation process that certifies the betting transaction the merchant would like to process is valid and legal in UIGEA terms.  After this the merchant will be given a certain code to send transactions in the future through that avoids automatic blocking.  There is a charge that goes along with this of course but this is not out of line with the time and energy it saves at $5,000.  It is not clear how the merchant verification value program will keep ahead of the vast changes that happen in the US online gambling market and whether validations will need to be repeated every time there is a new legislative move to change the state or federal level of legalization goal posts.