The issue with all those bounced affiliates checks last month seems to have been resolved.  Here is the news from the company.

Let me first say that I am very pleased to announce this news we just found out.

All Webmasterchecks’ accounts are being reactivated by the Department of Justice and our business is resuming normal operations. Any checks that were issued from our US Bank account will be able to be cashed and clear immediately. Our Bank of America account is moving more slowly and should be fully reactivated by tomorrow. Please have your affiliate’s hold Bank of America checks until we send out the confirmation that all is clear.

We would like to give you some background into our situation. When we started researching doing this type of business in 2003-2004, before launching in 2005, we discovered there were not any similar types of businesses that did what we do. Looking further into it, we discovered that many had been turned off by the government for sending out gambling payments or acting without compliance to important anti-money laundering rules, or because they had issues managing their funds and became insolvent.

Knowing this, while building Webmasterchecks, we formed extensive due-diligence procedures to comply with the Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act, Anti-Money Laundering laws, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Know-Your-Customer, UIGEA (gambling), registered with the Treasury Departments Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit, and took many other precautions. To give you an idea, an AML/BSA Risk Assessment typically runs 70k+, not to mention the Independent Audits and so forth.

During our business continuity audits, we had never expected our bank accounts to be frozen with no previous notification to us or our attorneys. To help prevent this from happening again in the future, our attorneys are proactively in the process of contacting all government agencies that have the authority to do these types of freezes, indicating our willingness to cooperate fully and establishing a relationship so that they can contact us directly in the future if any questions arise.

As stewards of our clients funds, we take these matters very seriously. We hired the right attorney, retained attorneys at a large Washington DC firm including a former assistant US Attorney General and general council to the Department of Homeland Security and got the matter resolved as quickly as possible.

In the next several days we will be providing you with a letter from our banks indicating that we are in good standing, a letter from our attorney with an explanation of what happened, and our attorney is meeting with the Assistant Attorney General of Maryland in the next several days to request a letter of explanation of what occurred, as well as a statement that they have found that we have not acted improperly in any way, and we will pass this over as well.

Webmasterchecks is moving forward. We understand the government has an important role in regulating all banking activity and we will continue to comply with all of the best practices established.

We look forward to resuming all operations and thank everyone for their patience while we resolve this matter fully.