Hours after telling PokerHelper.com that it had no plans to leave the U.S. market in the wake of the arrests of its founders, NETeller did an about-face.

Sort of.

Technically, NETeller, the world’s largest Internet money-transferring service, was telling the truth when a company spokesman in Calgary, Canada said Wednesday morning that NETeller is “not planning to abandon the U.S. market,” despite the arrests Monday of NETeller founders John Lefebvre and Stephen Lawrence by U.S. authorities on charges of money laundering and facilitating online gambling.

On Wednesday afternoon, NETeller released an official statement declaring that it will immediately “cease processing online transactions related to gambling for the U.S. market.”

But, since NETeller also said online transactions not related to gambling will continue to be processed for the U.S. market, technically the company is not leaving the U.S. market.

For all intents and purposes, though, NETeller has pretty much now left the U.S. market, since 95% of all online transactions processed by NETeller for the U.S. market have been gambling-related.

NETeller also said in its announcement that “customers not resident in the U.S. are not affected at all by this withdrawal from the U.S. market,” meaning online gamblers in countries other than the U.S. can continue to use NETeller to process online gambling transactions. However, since Americans make up 75% of the overall NETeller customer base, and that U.S. base is using NETeller almost entirely for gambling transactions, NETeller has basically lost three-quarters of its business overnight.

So, no, technically, they weren’t lying when they said they were leaving the U.S. market.

And they weren’t lying either, technically speaking of course, when a spokesman told PokerHelper.com that NETeller was not going to stop doing financial transactions with online gambling sites, because non-Americans will continue to be able to do so.

For how much longer, though, is anybody’s guess.

Overnight, NETeller has become a shell of what it once was, both in size and stature.

And if it shuts down sooner rather than later, it won’t be soon enough for U.S. authorities.