Online poker players looking for new ways to fund their poker accounts in the wake of the NETeller defection are turning to an unlikely source: telephone time.

Several online poker sites allow bettors to fund poker accounts by purchasing long distance telephone calling minutes from a third-party e-business and then transforming the pre-paid minutes into betting dollars.

Bodog (www.bodog.com), for example, which offers online poker, casino games and sports betting, allows customers to deposit funds via a website called NUcharge (www.nucharge.net).

Basically, here’s how it works: Using a credit card such as Visa or MasterCard, a customer purchases from NUcharge a quantity of long distance telephone minutes, say $100 worth.

Upon purchasing the phone time, the customer gets a PIN (personal identification number) that uniquely identifies his or her purchase.

The customer can then go to a participating online merchant’s website and buy $100 worth of goods or services—or in the case of Bodog, fund $100 into a gambling account—by providing his PIN to the merchant.

Another online gambling site, Dime Line Sports (www.dimelinesports.com), which also offers online poker, casino games and sports betting, allows customers to deposit funds for wagering via a website called Make A Deposit (www.makeadeposit.net).

Make A Deposit works pretty much the same way as NUcharge in that customers use credit cards to buy long distance telephone time and then convert the time into betting funds.

Sites like NUcharge and Make A Deposit typically charge a fee for each deposit/phone time purchase, like 3%, meaning a buy of 100 minutes of time would actually only equal $97 in betting funds.

Customers of these quasi-e-wallets can also typically buy phone time in units of 100 minutes, 150 minutes, 200 minutes or 300 minutes, but no more, meaning large bettors will have to look for other ways to fund their gambling unless they don’t mind making multiple purchases of phone time.

Unlike NETeller, though, which can be used by customers for both deposits and withdrawals, phone time vendors like Make A Deposit and NUcharge can only be used for depositing funds—you can’t collect from a gambling site with it.

Up until last week, many online poker players and other other online gamblers had been using NETeller (www.neteller.com), a so-called e-wallet, to send funds to and receive funds from online gambling sites.

After the U.S. Feds last week busted the Canadian founders of U.K.-based NETeller on charges of money laundering and facilitating online gambling, NETeller pulled the plug on the U.S. market and American cyber-gamblers were left scrambling for alternate ways to fund their online betting accounts.

At present, both NUcharge and Make A Deposit permit customers in the United States to use their services, but how long that will last is anybody’s guess.

Should NUcharge, Make A Deposit or any competitors offering similar services get popped by the Feds, you can bet they’ll likely abandon the U.S. market, too, once again leaving Internet gamblers in the lurch looking around for another new way around an old problem.