I received an email today from Matt Bisogno who runs the website Geegeez and he was pretty down. And I have a whole lot of sympathy for his predicament. Matt provides products and services to do with gambling. Now, in the UK this is all perfectly legal and to some extent encouraged. Unfortunately other countries don’t share this view and Matt has fallen foul of this prejudice.

It seems that two of the companies he had been quite happily using, Paypal and GetResponse have now decided that what Matt does breaks their terms of service.

I suffered a somewhat similar fate some while ago when a service I was using to deliver email newsletters shut down my account because I published information which they categorised as promoting ‘Get Rich quick’ schemes. Whilst I felt peed off about this it didn’t impact me anywhere near as much as how Matt will suffer.

He earns a living from his site and services and it now looks that by acting in this draconian manner these two companies will seriously impact Matt’s ability to earn an income. Personally I think this is churlish and once again the nanny state pokes its nose into somewhere its not wanted.

Granted gambling may be illegal in some countries (more nannystateism) but where it isn’t then people should be allowed to carry on their business without fear of losing everything at the whim of some ill drafted service terms. It can’t be beyond the whit of these companies to let Matt go about his business assuming he remains legal.

Now Matt finds himself with the hassle of having to find other ways to provide a service to his clients. Reading his missive it’s clear there will need to be some time for him to recover but hopefully he will eventually see this as a positive step rather than a negative one.

So, the last word must be to anyone who trades in the same sort of area. You’d be wise to check the terms of service on any online provider you are using to make sure they allow your activity. If they don’t start to plan now how you will transition elsewhere and you can decide when to leave rather than be ejected without ceremony. You have been warned!