Inside Asian Gaming

May 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 43 Online Gaming T he timing is suspicious. March saw Nevada regulators approving a partnership between Caesars and 888, and Wynn announcing a joint venture with PokerStars. Now come the indictments, three-billion-dollar civil suit and seizures of domain names by the feds. Wynn immediately cancelled his plans. Players were panicked. Which was, of course, the goal. If the allegations are true, the operators brought this on themselves, by lying and bribing bank officials. Of course, the prosecutors have the problem of convincing a jury that there is bank fraud when the ‘victims’ are tricked into making millions of dollars. And will this be the end of Internet poker? Did Prohibition end drinking? Prohibition created modern organised crime by outlawing alcoholic beverages. Whenpeoplewant somethingand it is illegal, organisations will arise to fill the demand. Howmuch more so when the activity, online poker, is not even clearly illegal? Every action by the US federal government makes it more difficult for it to go after the next operator. The UIGEA [Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act], rammed through by the failed politician Bill Frist (R.-TN), can be seen as an anti- consumer-protection law, because it scared all of the publicly traded gaming companies out of the US market. Then prosecutors went after payment processors, making it more difficult for players to find legitimate ways to send their money to betting sites. Lacking the two essentials to any prosecution— a statute that clearly makes the activity illegal and a defendant physically present in the US— the feds have announced showy legal action against easy targets about every other year. Now the feds have seized .com domain names and charged operators with bank Federal Poker Indictments: Revisiting Prohibition By Professor I. Nelson Rose