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Basically I was looking to use stripe to take online payments for an online lottery website however the application is marked as a prohibited business.

Prohibited Businesses: Gambling

Lotteries; bidding fee auctions; sports forecasting or odds making; fantasy sports leagues with cash prizes; internet gaming; contests; sweepstakes; games of chance

Alternative Options??

I was looking for another option instead of stripe that would take online payments for my application.

It is a startup business so i would like the payment option to handle the merchant bank account side like stripe/paypal.

The project is being developed on asp.net, web forms c#.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Ryan
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  • In which country will your gambling app be available? – Benjamin Soulier Sep 07 '16 at 07:29
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    In general, payment companies like Stripe, Square, Paypal are limited by restrictions from their support banks, which are very limited by the US government in terms of payment processing for pseudo legal things. You are likely going to have to look international, or currency alternatives. – tristansokol Sep 12 '16 at 21:32
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    Bitcoin would allow you to circumvent a lot of these issues, but you may be putting yourself in a legal gray zone. – KoldBane Sep 13 '16 at 18:45
  • The gambling app will be for the UK – Ryan Sep 22 '16 at 17:52

1 Answers1

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Most countries are regulating gambling of any form.

A few examples:

There is a good chance that your Lottery application will fall under the same regulation, in which case you have to contact whichever authority in your country to ask them how you can create a gambling application under required law, if permitted (keeping in mind that this could be a pretty tedious and long process).

Bottom line of your question:

Stripe or other online payment systems are not allowing these types of payments because of this regulation.

Even if passing the barrier of regulation, a lot of technical restrictions would have to be applied to verify people residence to avoid legal issues.

UPDATE:

One option as mentioned in comments would be to use Bitcoin (using it with ASP.NET) as an alternative money to circumvent legal issues, but that doesn't mean that this is not regulated yet or going to be in a near future (which falls legally under a Lacuna).

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Benjamin Soulier
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