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U.S. Arrests Online Gambling Company Chairman
imaginaryelf writes "Reuters reports that U.S. authorities have arrested Peter Dicks, the chairman of U.K. based online sports betting company Sportingbet Plc, while he was passing through Dallas. Just two months ago, the CEO of another U.K. based online sports betting company, BetOnSports, was arrested on U.S. soil as well. They are both charged with violating the 1961 Federal Wire Act, which can be broadly interpreted as declaring all forms of online gambling illegal in the U.S. Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century?"
WHEREAS ALL they NEED to do and HAD to do is to bar all access from u.s. to that u.k. site
If the US government did that, then you'd be complaining about censorship.
The problem is that this guy and his company accepted money from US citizens who were on US soil in exchange for providing a service that is illegal in the US. It would be trivial for him to refuse credit card transactions for cards where the address on record is in the US, and at least then he'd have plausible deniability. Of course, doing so destroys most of his market, so it's easy to see why he wouldn't do that.
This is either harrassment or just the US thinking it has rights to push the rest of the world around.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In the last three cases we expect the citizen to follow the law, because to restrict or monitor access would be UnAmerican. Gambling is a "vice" crime so to the law enforcement "religion" it's different. The fundamental problem is that it's easier for the govt to collar these guys illegally than it is to fix the real problem going on in the country. Also, "rightist" state legislatures and law enforcement work very hard to delay, subjorn, etc. the Will of the people to change these backwards laws. For them "Law" is the "religion" and so they should not "compromise" even if the people vote for it.
The only crime the offshore gaming companies committed is competing against US based brick and mortar casinos. If you travel out of a state that doesn't have gambling to a state that does, isn't the casino enabling an act that couldn't occur in the gambler's home state? The gaming corporations don't want more competition (they spent alot of money in California to restrict Indian Casinos) and the federal and state government don't want to lose revenue from offshore gambling.
I now hereby dub YOU "Bad Analogy Guy, Jr." (in reference to your previous post, of course).
Last time I checked, using and selling drugs are BOTH illegal in the U.S. Therefore, both users and dealers should be arrested.
Whether the law makes sense or not makes little difference to the law enforcement community. This guy broke a U.S. law, and he was arrested for it.
The REAL question here is whether he broke the law on U.S. soil, which really boils down further to the question: where exactly is a website located? Is it located where the server is located? Or is it located where the person using the website is located? If it's the former, then the U.S. people who used the website could be considered to be gambling in a foreign country, and not on U.S. soil, because the website is technically located in the U.K. (and thus they were not breaking U.S. law). But if the latter question is true, then the administrator of any website can be held accountable by the laws of any country any user connects from, even those laws that contradict each other.
Either way, the U.S. government is going to do the same thing with online gambling that they did with alcohol: ignore it, then ban it, realize that ban creates crime, unban it, tax the ever living hell out of it, and finally protect the industry forevermore as a revenue stream.
Wait, it'll happen.
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You are right on the money.
I lived in Toronto for 13 years, and I decided to go to New Zealand to visit some friends and see how the place is like for a longer term basis. Quickest way to get from Toronto, Canada to Auckland, New Zealand is probably take a flight from Toronto to LA, then from LA to Auckland. Seeing how soem of my muslim friends got treated in the US (more like his parents, who are elderly), me being "non-white", more tech savvy (I brought my computer along, I love my Shuttle box), I don't want to take the chance of having dealing with American customs and risk having my data inspected, so I took the long way, went to Hong Kong (I was born there), which was nice because I got to see my relatives and do some shopping, before leaving for Auckland a week later. My return journey will be the same, and I will never step foot in America again, even as a stop over (aside from the Anchorage technical stopover, but we never were allowed to get off the plane, which is fine with me).
Even though the whole journey is about 8 hours longer in total flight time, it's worth it for me. Cathay Pacific gets my business also because they are one of the best airlines in the world. The price was right too, my mom's travel agent was able to secure the flight I took (round trip) for only CND$2200, which is definitely unbeatable. My parents told me they recently took a flight with Air Canada from Toronto to Vancover, they said the service was appalling and the staff did not know what to do, and the food and flight was expensive (CND$800 per person). It's absolutely disgraceful that North American airlines are completely backwards and behind in terms of service (given the cost) compared to their Asian counterparts.
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