some questions about FirePay

[gumpzilla]

So I'm looking into creating a FirePay account and linking it to a savings account that I would keep strictly for poker money. I'm looking at FirePay instead of Neteller because I read a thread a few weeks ago in this forum that said that Neteller won't allow accounts from users based in Maryland.

Anyway, I'm reading through the terms of use for FirePay, and I've already come across a couple of things that seem potentially unappetizing.

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You acknowledge that the purpose of your account is for purchasing a wide variety of goods and services from Authorized Merchants. You hereby covenant not to use FirePay for any purpose that may be considered to be illegal under any laws applicable to you.

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Unlike other clauses, there's no explicit mention of what they do to your account should such activity be found to take place (having now read the whole thing, it would appear that at the end they can terminate the account for violation of terms and that this would result in the forfeiture of any funds kept in there. The risks associated with this, I would assume, could be dodged by not keeping any money directly in the account.) However, I would imagine that like most U.S. citizens, it is probably technically illegal for me to be playing online poker (this appears to be the consensus of those who I've seen posting who appear to be legally well informed.) How concerned should I be about this? I'm assuming not very, otherwise I'd hear far more people complaining.

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8. Collection of Funds You Owe Us. You authorize us to obtain and to do a credit report and do a credit check on you at the time you make a request to use and each time you do use our Service.

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Really? Allow me to again show my ignorance, but I was under the impression that repeated credit checks tended to degrade one's credit rating. Do they actually do this?

Lastly, it appears that there is a $4 charge or so for funding the account. Does this only apply to funding from a bank account linked to the FirePay account, or does it also apply to transfers from poker sites to FirePay? I'm assuming the latter. I'm glad that FirePay's terms of use at least mentions this; when I read Neteller's terms a long time ago, there was absolutely no mention I could find of any kind of fee for the service, which made me pretty suspicious.

[Girchuck]

They do not charge you for withdrawals from poker sites or deposits to poker sites.
Firepay is providing you with incentive to put a lot of money at once by charging a flat fee for each deposit from the bank.
The clause about illegal activities tries to cover their ass by putting the responsibility on user.
They will not do a credit check on you every time you make a transaction, because credit checks are not free and their profit margin will not cover them. They just need an explicit authorization from you so that they can randomly check if you used bum checks before. They'll probably do 0-1 credit checks on you.

[gumpzilla]

[ QUOTE ]
They do not charge you for withdrawals from poker sites or deposits to poker sites.
Firepay is providing you with incentive to put a lot of money at once by charging a flat fee for each deposit from the bank.

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This is excellent news, then, since at this point I'm not planning on making deposits from the bank.

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They will not do a credit check on you every time you make a transaction, because credit checks are not free and their profit margin will not cover them. They just need an explicit authorization from you so that they can randomly check if you used bum checks before. They'll probably do 0-1 credit checks on you.

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This sounds reasonable, and I'm inclined to believe it, but your language makes it sound like a guess rather than fact. Am I wrong about this? Anybody have some concrete sense of how many credit checks FirePay might have run on them?

Thanks for the reply.