Good afternoon. You're listening to Gambling with an Edge. Now here are your
hosts, Bob Dancer and Richard Munchkin. Good afternoon, Welcome to Gambling with
an Edge. I'm Bob Dancer and I'm Richard Muchkin. Richard and I have
had more than a ten year run on Gambling with an Edge, and when
we quit almost seven months ago, we said we might have some additional shows
on an irregular basis. This is the first one of those. It's taken
longer than I thought to get a regular. We received an email from attorney
Bob Lobe that he had some legal issues with online casinos to discuss with our
audience and were we interested the stupid question. Of course we're interested. A
few years ago we posed a conundrum or whether Bob Lobe was the Midwest Bob
Nursessian or whether Bob Nursessian was the Las Vegas Bob Bla. We never did
figure it out, and it turns out it doesn't matter. Both attorneys are
friends with each other and friends of the show. So Bob Lobe, welcome
to Gambling with an Edge. Great to be back. All right, before
I start asking questions to Bob Lobe or Richard, did you have something you
wanted to say? Well, yeah, just that I'm I. You know,
I'm still trying to find my way with the life as a gamble a
podcast. I kind of don't really know what it is yet or what I'm
doing. But when this, when Bob Lobe contacted me about this, I
was like, you know what, this is definitely a gambling with an Edge
episode, and so I was just really happy to be able to call Bob
answer and say, hey, do you want to do this episode? And
he of course said yes, and so here we are. And who knows
how often these episodes will present themselves, but at least once in a while
we'll be back with a gambling with an Edge episode. And I'm happy about
that. Good, happy, happy, everybody happy. All right, So,
Bob Love, today we're talking about legal issues with online casinos. What
is this all about? Okay, we're talking primarily sports betting, and as
everybody knows that the sports books have just sprouted up in almost every state,
sometimes many different sports books, and we are in the stage where the law
is not clearly written. It's kind of the wild wild West. States have
not even when they're regulating states have not really drawn up laws that regulate the
rules of sports betting. Sometimes there should be statutes that are on the book
that tell them what to do. Sometimes there are administrative rules that get promulgated
and passed that are not quite as accessible, certainly to the general public or
in this case, gamblers. And one of the things that has grown out
of that is that the rules and the terms and conditions that are posted on
a website, the kind of thing not just in gambling, where everybody if
they want to, if they want to access their bank account or access a
particular website or in this case of sports book, we all have blindly,
i'm sure, checked the terms and conditions that we're agreeing to them without reading
them, and even if we read them, it would be legal mumbo jumbo.
And so many people are gambling without any knowledge of some of the consequences
that where I get calls from gamblers who have some issues. The sports books
are not necessarily the area in which I have been most engaged in my practice,
but I have had quite a number of very distressing calls where in a
nutshell, people's accounts have been suspended and in some cases their amounts have been
seized or the casino the sports book are refusing to give it back, and
I'm talking up to half a million dollars in actually several cases, which is
quite distressing. Yeah. Absolutely, And so now we're talking here about legal
regulated sports books. And again, you know, people ask me all the
time, you know, do casinos cheat? And my answer is, in
the old days, they used to deal seconds and gaff the games, and
the modern version of that is casino's just try to steal your money. And
now they're doing this in sports books. They are now just sometimes locking up
people's money and refusing to pay. Absolutely, I would have used the words
that casinos are legally licensed these days. I'm not sure that they're being regulated
much. And a couple horror stories come from Native American casinos that have sportsbooks
now, and I have to comment that the regulators are the same casinos.
The Indians are regulating themselves exactly, and we all know. I think what
happens when you get to regulate yourself, and so what is happening, I
mean, if you had any success getting money back for people. I've had
varied success. I've had failures as well. I have had a number of
successes on relatively small amounts where somebody's the casino's refusing to return the balance that
is in a person's account, and that's where we've gotten involved. It's a
little bit difficult for me to get a handle on litigating it because everything is
online. When you open up an account on a sportsbook, you don't really
have a human teller taking bets. You don't have a human casino manager.
You don't have any way of really being in touch with them other than on
their comments page. So it becomes difficult. But let me start with one,
with one thing that I want to mention to a lot of people.
This should be one of the few times where I really know what I'm doing
and have a helpful suggestion. Don't keep more money in your account than you
need to currently place your bets. Because some people have run up really high
balances, they have committed what the casinos feel is an improper act. They
have suspended the entire account. In other words, again, I've had a
few cases where people have had balances of half a million dollars. There might
be only fifteen or twenty thousand dollars that's really in dispute, where the casinos
think somebody did wrong, but the people are not getting their half a million
dollars back. So what are the kind of excuses the casinos are using to
do this? Okay, I'm not the tech expert. Casinos have prohibited the
use of certain apps AI in sports betting. They have prohibited inside information,
which is not necessarily paying off the refs like in the old days, or
or paying a player to blow a game. But I think, but,
like you know, Lebron is injured, but the news hasn't come out yet,
so you're betting before the news comes out. That kind of thing,
right, right? And they using they use the phrase information that is not
at this point publicly available. But more they really fear the apps and the
algorithms that people people have, people who are probably even more savvy than the
people who make the lines and get an advantage that way, and are betting
huge and are really attacking the bottom line of the casinos. The other thing
that is very very common that I get the most complaints about, and this
is one worry out necessarily dealing with huge money, is the rules. The
terms and conditions are prohibiting multiple people on the same account, sharing of information
and they've gotten good at that. When we started out basically a couple of
years ago with online sports books, it was kind of every casino or every
company like fan duel Er, Draft Kings or at MGM or whatever. They
all had their own terms and conditions, rules and regulations. But I've definitely
seen a trend where they've been sharing information and even some of the smaller companies
have the most detailed terms and conditions that have so many esoteric rules and rasiology
like, we can do this if we feel like it. In other words,
in our sole discretion, we can shut down an account. We can
forfeit the money in our sole discression. And the only remedy that a player
has in some of these things is something that often violates public policy, and
that's a mandatory arbitration clause, which says you can't take us to court.
You can only go to mandatory arbitration, and any can only go to the
company that we regularly use and support. In other words, you're getting a
bias hearing. Wow, Yeah, And can you tell us who the worst
offenders are? I'm not entirely sure because my knowledge is only really from the
phone calls that I get. I have read that duel has gone to some
skewed or lesser paying nods, particularly on correlated vets. Oh well, but
yeah, what they're free to do. Yeah, okay, I mean,
like, are you getting more than one person where the same company is stealing
their money. I haven't gotten enough costs to say I've got a pattern,
but they're all over the place. It's been some some Indian a couple of
Indian casinos that are not affiliated with let's call them a tribal chaint of Indian
casinos. We're talking some discrete Well they have one bricks and mortar casino and
now they have their own sportsbook, and they've gotten really sophisticated with denying people
the rights. But I've probably got a smattering of eight, nine, ten
more of the or single complaints from the larger chain. So maybe maybe these
are random. Maybe we're very much in this infancy, as you say,
the wild the wildless. I wish I could say, you know, there's
there's one single changement that is really terrible. I would, but it's everybody.
I want your listeners know, you know, yeah, yeah, Now
it's part of the problem. Just these gamblers are too good at picking winners,
and so the casinos don't want their action. Kind It's kind of similar
to an ap at table games, you know, in a bricks and mortar
casino. Yes, you're too good, you can play any other game.
Well you can't bet sports in these cases, you know, well you can,
but you're limited ten dollars a bet and absolutely and we would have yes,
absolutely, which which is fine. I mean, you know, we
all would look at that as the cost of doing business. It's when they
start stealing your money. And the same thing happens in casinos, you know,
with advantage players. They just take their money and say, try to
get it back, yep, And eventually usually usually you do, but you
know, it becomes costly in a big hassle. Let me give you a
couple of horror stories that are public at this point. First one started out
in England and it was a guy who got together a group sports betting and
they were taking the advantage of what I referred to as as the bonus.
You know, bet your first bet and we're going to give you one hundred
and fifty dollars or things like that, and there were some people who were
They found out that a single person got together a group of fifteen or twenty
people, and nobody was betting much more than the bonuses. But the fifteen
twenty people were not really placing those bets. They weren't doing the gambling.
It was just it was just this one leader. And it's not unlike something
that we've seen for several years now on slot pay and people who build up
a large loss on a single on a single day, but they're getting coupons
for ten days per month in the future. And they've got individuals who do
their redeeming because they can't be there every day to do the redeeming. So
the casinos are very much resisting when a single person is called at the very
least calling the shots or using the identification and the phone and the credit card
of other people. And in some cases the casinos are seeing the same pattern
of vets and they're cracking down on it, and they're saying, you a
violated all of our terms, conditions, one other, one other trap.
And believe me, I'm not the techie who can explain this well, but
a VPN is kind of similar to blocking collar ID, where somebody is hiding
the URL from which they are placing bets. Yeah, it can make you
appear to be in another country or another state. Correct, or you're hiding
that fact. Now, most states, when they are licensing online sportsbooks are
online gambling. They are legally restricted to either residents of their state placing the
bets or being physically present in the state when placing the bets. Okay,
but some keys, when they feel that they've got a particularly strong advantage on
some particular games, are placing bets from one location in five or ten or
fifteen different states. Violates the terms of the conditions. The casinos or the
casino industry has gradually obtained the technological capability of tracking bets and are not only
turning down bets that come from other states because their license says they have to
turn down those bets. But when somebody has attempted and they can show to
their own satisfaction that winning bets have been placed from several states, they are
disallowing those bets. And in a way, we could live with that,
but they're freezing the accounts and taking the money, and we can't live with
that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you found some way to
get around their geolocation software, which they have, fine, But if you
call your brother who lives in that state, and he gets on his account
and makes the bet. They shouldn't be able to, you know, freeze
his account. No, because you made the same bet in another state.
That's true. Their technology is also showing them when they're getting in effect,
the same bets on the same games in the same oh, the same combinations.
I guess you'd call them such that they think they are finding out that
this is a group of people who are using the same information. Well,
but yeah, I mean, but sure, that's true. There are groups
that do that, that bet in multiple states. But I mean, how
can there be anything wrong with that? Well, in just a minute,
they're saying, if a group of ten in the same state are placing the
same six bets on the same day, on the same teams in the same
games, nothing more, that's a pattern that they are uncovering and presuming that
that is wrongful collusion according to their terms and condition. Under the laws of
a few states, not most Illinois is one, there's something called syndicated gambling
where they would interpret that as there's kind of like a single bookie or single
better taking advantage of a particular line. In other words, Richard, you
referred when bets come from several states, that's not so terrible. But when
they but if there's this collusion based on inside information and all the bets are
coming from the same state, that that would not be as serious. The
casinos are treating it as just as as serious. And I do think you
know, we're in the infancy of AI. I think that is what's driving
the casinos because they think that somebody who's very adept at using AI will come
up with better information in the aggregate, even if it's not inside information.
Well, sure they and they do. They don't even before AI. I
mean, you know, the sharp sports betters were sharper than the sports books,
right, So, yeah, that's just the way of the world.
Now, let me give you one other kind of thought. Common law fraud.
Long before we even had gambling in the United States. One of the
definitions of common law fraud that applies in most state laws is if you make
a false statement in order to obtain something that isn't yours, that's fraud.
Classic example is if you inflate your income on a mortgage application to show that
you really qualify per a particular mortgage. That's fraud. Okay, And as
the law has developed in the United States, And I'm going to give you
an example that many people have heard about. Even if you make good on
the false statement, in other words, the casino, the sports better or
the mortgage company, even if you make good on your payments on the mortgage
and the say again the casino is not harmed thereby the fact that you made
the false statement can be fraud. The example that's in the news these days,
I'm going to mention it within New York is in New York Donald Trump's
case in New York State Court, where he made very serious false statements to
Deutsche Bank. The government does not have to prove that they were harmed by
the false statements. The fact that he made them is fraud. Okay.
Now, how does this relate to sports books? Is then, when a
redeemer on slot play or a group of people, if one person is using
seven phones with the numbers that are registered to severn different people, but they
find that it's all out of one location, and they get some more information,
such as they have a at least somewhat provable belief that one person is
using seven identities perhaps to get these bonuses or whatever. A false statement doesn't
have to be a verbal statement. It can be an act. And when
you put somebody else's player's card in the machine with another name, that is
a false statement. And when you register for an online account in somebody else's
name, real person or not, you're making a false statement that you are
that person, and that violates the terms of conditions. And that has served
to freeze a few accounts, in one huge one that I'm aware of.
Okay, so if you guys are living in a dorm, everybody go to
a different Starbucks to make your bets. Well, it's interesting. The other
public case that has gotten a fair amount of attention in the country is a
case out of Iowa. Now it happens that this has gotten not only a
lot of publicity, but it came to the it came to the authority's attention.
Was a college dorm that a few college athletes were living in and a
few games or a lot of bets were placed on games in which those athletes
were participating. Okay, that's more of you know, the classic kind of
fixing the game that we've known about for one hundred years. Okay, but
Iowa brought charges against the leader for some serious money fraud against the athletes,
and then the NCAA got involved, and some other betters all who were involved
in the same scheme. And so you know, if you're you know,
if you're in touch with athletes and they're placing bets for you, let that
be a warning. The more common warning I think is huge betters have a
bullseye on their back's that's where they pay attention. Okay, that's where these
half a million dollar accounts came from. For those of you who are in
a group, there's one, actually two groups that I'm aware of, in
which there was kind of a loser better, but a real big better who
got affiliated with the sharp betters. And because the loser better had a long
record of losing, the casino was more eager to take his action, okay,
And so the big guys put their action into the name of the of
the big loser better, and the casinos or the sportsbook got wise to what
was going on. One of the problems was one of the problem legal problems,
was that this big loser was a wealthy licensed professional. Now if I
were, if I were another lawyer wanted to bring a lawsuit it would have
to be in the name of the account holder, who's who put the money
up and placed the bets. In one case, a licensed professional was risking
much more than his gambling losses. He was losing his or potentially losing his
livelihood because he would lose his license if it was publicly known that he was
involved in this kind of betting. He would lose his license for betting at
a legal sportsbook, for using other people's names, which under a lot of
money wandering statutes is a violation. We're talking doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers licensed
by the sec. You know, professionals who were But he wasn't using other
people's names. Somebody was using his name to make the bets. Right,
Well, at times they were giving money to the licensed professional to place the
bets. I see, because they could, because he could put down bigger
money. Yeah, okay. And so this guy declined to be a complainant,
and all of the other people were without a remedy. They had another
real funny phone call. It was funny because it came from the general manager
of it. He said of an East Coast sports book who and he showed
the knowledge, So I believed him that he was such. He was in
the middle of a divorce, wife had custody. Sixteen year old son got
a hold of wife's credit card. Sixteen year old son started sports betting online
in his mother's name, losing a lot of money, pissing off the father.
Okay, and the father kept kind of insisting with me that I can
write the somewhat usual demand letter that I've had some success with, saying you've
abused this, you've gone too far, You had no right to keep all
of his money. Okay, And I should send the demand letter to the
gambling wasn't being on it, the sports book that was being run by dad.
Okay, that my demand letter will have the effect of scaring the sports
book into thinking that their license could be in jeopardy for accepting an underage regular
better. Okay, And I sympathized with him in a way, but I
had to decline. And this applies to everybody who's using an underaged kid,
and a college dorm often qualifies you may be without a remedy because for you
to maintain your complaint to get all this money back means the lawyer has to
elicit from the underage guy his client a confession to a crime, and I
wasn't going to put a client in that position. Yeah, if the underage
kid had used his own name an ID, then you got you know,
it seems to have a case. Well then yes, because the casino would
be on notice of the proper age. Yes, but I think in the
Iowa case they were even using the idea of somebody who's twenty one. You
know, you can figure out the rest and I know that, I know
that. You know, some of these are rather unique factual situations and won't
apply to most listeners, but the abuse by the casino. Don't continue to
do this in more facial situations if they continue to get away with it,
particularly where their terms and conditions are so restrictive, where anybody using a fake
ID could be subject to this and it could get really out of hand.
And so well, let's go to what can be done. I mean,
you mentioned don't let your balance get to I want to close, and I
want to close on that note, maybe that's my recommendation. All right,
anybody can always supplement their account, you know, with more capital if they've
been losing and need to. Okay, although there is a problem with banks
who do not like you making transfers back and forth to casinos, and many
people have had their bank accounts shut down too, So that is a problem,
but not as big a problem as having your money stolen exactly. But
I have a couple of ideas or suggestions as well, and those are I
think there are two things that are greatly underutilized, and those are the press
and your representatives. So one idea would be to get a sports writer who
likes to gamble involved in all this stuff and let him start writing articles about
the stuff these places are doing. That is a great suggect. Yes,
and in a similar vein attention that you can get for this stuff, the
more they will have to stop it. And in a similar vein, this
is actually out of a bricks and mortar casino several years ago, we succeeded
in getting money back by merely threatening to put up billboards criticize on the roads
leading to the casino. That's cheating. Yeah, that's a great idea.
Like the press, it's a public airing of what they've done. Well.
The other thing that has been successful is, you know, politicians are very
cheap to buy. You make a twenty six hundred dollars contribution to a guy's
campaign and literally you can get his home cell phone number and in the case
back god, it's probably been forty years. Tommy Hyland, they made some
donation to a guy and you know, explain to him what the casinos were
doing to blackjack players, and he's like, that's that can't be true,
right, And they took him to the casinos in Atlantic City and got him
barred for being a card counter. And that's really why those laws got passed
that you're not allowed to bar card counters in Atlantic City. So I'm sure
there are a lot of politicians that like to bet on football, and you
get some of them involved, get them backed off, you know from sports
books where they're only allowed to bet a dollar fifty seven or whatever, which
you know, literally some people are limited to these miniscule amounts, and you
know, good things can happen, you know. Actually that touches. I'm
glad you mentioned Tommy. With the exception of Tommy and James Gross, I
can't tell you the number of times people have called me with a beef about
what's happened to them. Any casino APIs okay, yeah, and we go
through the whole process and here's what it will involve, and they don't want
to publicly out themselves. Yeah, I think it's a big mistake. Look
and Tommy and James Grocery, two of the most well known aps, and
they still can play all the hours they want to play. I couldn't.
I couldn't agree with you more. I had a case ready to go where
I happened to know that there were commissioners on the Missouri Gaming Board who would
have been receptive to outlawing premp shuffles, and their casinos were engaging in it.
Okay, and keep in my Missouri was one of the places where you
couldn't bar people, and they were. And I had four or five people
not willing to each being a victim of that, not willing to be the
plaintiff, not willing to even be a witness that it was done to them.
And it's very frustrating. But the moral of all this is, don't
put yourself in the position of being a victim of one of these so that
you don't have to hire a lawyer, you don't have to fight with the
casino. And again I'm getting back to you know, take profits when you
can despite the banks. So is there amount of money that is too small
to worry about? Like, if you have ten thousand in an account,
is it all right to let it sit there? Or is that well with
your place? If you're placing eleven dollars bets to make ten dollars ten thousand
is probably on the high side. But the issue that you're raising, Bob,
is really very similar to what's the choke point of any given casino,
and it varies among casinos. Okay, but presumably you are optimistic that you
will get back this half million dollars from this sports better who was, say,
pushing the envelope in the casino didn't like it. Is that a fair
assessment. I've had three or four that were particularly large amounts utterly failed in
one. One is pending with the most modern of terms and conditions that give
you no rights at all, And I'm not so optimistic. There is one
other doctrine of law that I like a lot to use in the kind of
area. It's called the doctrine of unjust enrichment. And I would apply it
in the way so as to say a casino, okay, you get to
keep the hypothetic Well, I mean not even do hypothetic. You keep the
relatively small amount that you feel was improper, but you're not entitled to the
balance that's in the account. That would be totally unfair, even though your
rules and terms and conditions say you can and if and if we want it,
and we can't sue in a regular court, we'd have to go to
your friendly arbitrator. I've got no reason to be optimistic in those cases,
and in the aggregate, on those cases, most of which involve smaller amounts,
the client and I kind of come to the to the to the conclusion
that when we weigh risk and reward on a relatively small amount, the attorney's
fees and I'm not charging huge fees, eat up too much to where the
risk is greater than the potential reward. In other words, well, it's
kind of this way in the entire legal system. Nobody can bring a lawsuit
for less than thirty or forty thousand dollars these days, because the outcome is
always somewhat questionable, and the attorneys or fees are going to be ten to
fifteen thousand dollars, and that's just not worth it. In other words,
a huge portion of the population is shut out of access to the legal system.
Yeah. Well, you know, a guy who can afford half a
million in one account at one place can probably afford some billboards, so maybe
maybe agreed. Yeah, well, this has been great, Bob. I
want to thank you for doing this. Bob and Bob both so good and
as a listener, I hope some more people come to you and you do
more gambling with a head shows. Well we are open to that possibility.
Yeah, yeah, thank you, Bob. Now, at the end of
our show, Richard and I used to have a recommended section where we would
recommend something to our listeners. So Richard, do you have a recommended for
our audience today? Of course I do, and it's very apropos of this
particular episode. I just last night started watching a show on HBO Max called
Bookie, and it is about a guy who is a bookie in LA And
I mean he's kind of a throwback to the nineteen eighties or something, because
modern day private bookies all use a website. You know, you can just
rent a website that where people can you know, it has all the software
to make your bets on. But no, this guy still carries around a
notepad and a pencil and writes down the bets and people call him on the
phone. And the show is a comedy and it's creator is Chuck Lorie,
who's the guy who did Two and a half Men and Big and Big Bang
Theory, Yes, and many other shows. And surprisingly, you know,
he had this horrendous falling out with Charlie Sheen over Two and a half Men,
and Charlie Sheen is this is in this series and you know, at
the end of Two and a half Men, he dropped a piano on Charlie
Sheen like it was a guy a body double dress like Charlie Sheen. But
you know, he had some really terrible things to say, but apparently they
patched that up in Charlie. Charlie Sheen is not the star of the show,
but he just shows up as himself as a guy who owes the BOOKIY
money. So anyway, the show is pretty funny and if you like and
if you're into sports betting, obviously you're probably already watching the show anyway,
but definitely give it a give it a watch. My recommended is a new
novel by Mitch album A L. B. O. M. Called The
Little Liar It is basically a love story that begins in the Jewish quarter of
Greece prior to World War Two, where the Nazis eventually come in and gather
up all the dudes, and there's Auschwitch involved in some It's pretty horrible what
they describe. So I had read other descriptions of the Holocaust, and this
one is open my eyes to certain things. It is a love story,
and it is it is, it's well worth reading. Bob. Stick with
what I am to stick with what I said. My recommendation, take profits
out of your account when you can. You'll avoid a lot of trouble,
will avoid having to hire you. Yes, so that sounds good for the
listener, not so good for your bankroll. But that's not where I make
my living. And I've said this for years. I'm so thrilled to be
part of the AP community and all of whom taught me how to be an
AP that I like to give back to the community when I can, so
kind of a repository for some of the horror stories that I can relate to
others. And the AP community is glad to have you as part of it.
So thank you very much. Thank you Richard go out and hit lots
of royal flushes. Everybody, good day,