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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?"
Now my $1000 bet that Peter Dicks would be arrested doesn't look quite so foolish...call my bookie!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
according the article, he was arrested @ kennedy, not in dallas.
If you live outside of the US and have done something that the US have made illegal then don't go there.
I would say cigarette smoking is much closer to alcohol prohibition. I just hope that once they ban smoking in bars I can open up a speakeasy where we'll drink and smoke and gamble online to our heart's content....
>organised gambling isn't nearly as widespread and deeply rooted in Western culture as consuming alcohol is.
You wanna bet?
Its another great example of the US deciding that its perfectly okay to have their laws apply to people from other countries, but the idea of an international criminal court that might try CIA and US Soldiers for torture and crimes against humanity then the answer is no.
Remind me again why people think the US is imperialist?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
In the near future, the United States of America may be a country that non-Americans fear to travel to. With the DMCA, the Patriot Act, association with gambling sites, corporate deals with Iran, corporate deals with Cuba ... you just simply do not know whether or not you will be arrested when entering the United States. If your non-American company did business with Cuba, could you be arrested? If you engaged in fair use of media in your country, could you be arrested for DMCA violations?
You won't know until you are on American soil.
Of course, were the USA we can do what ever we want... I often wonder how we'd react if say Bill Gates was arrested in Communist China for being an "obscenely rich capitalist"..
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.
He let's Americans gamble on his site, so he lets them break the law. That's illegal. At least that what I'm guessing their logic is. My guess is that their claim to him is a little tenuous to say the least. I bet he refused to bar access from US betters. The US's stance is hardly unknown, especially if you are in that industry.
I think that "online gambling is prohibition" comment is rather ridiculous. Online gambling is something people do from home, where one of the big things about prohibition is that it removed a common social activity (going to a bar with friends and to meet people). They are nothing alike except that they are both bans on something popular, and (are likey to get) overturned.
Don't forget that there is a REASON online gambling is still illegal. While that act can be intrepreted that way, Congress could have easily changed that by passing a law. However, don't think that all the casinos in Vegas and elsewhere like the idea of online gambling. That could take away a LOT of a their business if it was legalized. I'd be amamzed if they weren't pouring out money to keep online gambling illegal.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Well, go to betonsports.com
"To contact BetonSports Customer Service please call toll free 1-866-481-3057. You may also send email requests to:
customer_service@betonsports.com
Customer Service hours are Monday to Friday, 10am - 10pm EST. "
Hmm, looks like a US number and a US timezone there. May be UK based, but they are definitely targeting business to the US
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
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.
No. Marijuana is the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century.
British people. British companies. Americans charging them with crimes as soon as they set foot on US soil.
What a load of bullshit.
So if cocaine was legal in the UK and they sold it to people in the US then the feds shouldn't go after them? (Replace cocaine with any product or service that fits) Just because something is legal in one country doesn't mean one can't face prosecution in another country where it's illegal if that product/service is offered in the other country.
I worked briefly for a company that ran a gambling website in the UK in conjunction with Harrahs casino. On-line gaming is apparently huge in the UK. In order to legally operate the site there were all sorts of checks to verify that a user was based in the UK. It included not only identifying the physical location of an IP address but validating the address of a credit card and other steps. Apparently all legitimite gambling sites in the UK are required to take these sort of steps if you don't want to run afoul of UK gaming laws. If this was a legit UK gaming website then they would have these same checks in place that would prevent people in the US from using it. It's his own fault for violating US laws (that happen to be well known in the gambling community) and thinking that he could travel here without getting arrested.
Remember Dmitry Sklyarov?
Perhaps this is all a fiendish plot to cut down on US tourism...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
> L
You are sitting in an airplane seat, in the coach section of an airliner. The airliner is descending.
> I
You are carrying:
>READ TICKET
I don't see any ticket here.
>READ TICKET STUB
The ticket stub is for an intercontinental flight from Great Britain to Mexico, with a stopover in Dallas.
>DALLAS?
I don't know how to dallas.
>DOES THIS PLANE HAVE A STOPOVER IN DALLAS?
I don't see any plane here.
>LEAVE PLANE
Your seatbelt holds you in the seat, preventing you from standing up.
>OPEN SEATBELT
You cannot open that.
>UNFASTEN SEATBELT
Unfastened.
>LEAVE PLANE
You need to stand up first.
>STAND UP
You are now standing. The passenger sitting next to you looks agitated.
>LEAVE PLANE
The exit doors are locked, as the plane is still in flight.
>FUCK
I don't know how to fuck.
The plane is about to land in Dallas. You are likely to be arrested by a grue.
>ARE THEY GOING TO ARREST ME?
I don't see any they here.
>EXIT
You cannot exit now.
Your sword is glowing faintly.
>QUIT
You cannot quit now.
Your sword is glowing faintly.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
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.
Casino winnings are taxed
If Congress could figure out a way to tax all online gambling winnings, they'd do it in a heartbeat. (Specifically winnings paid out by companies outside the U.S.A.)
As it is now, if you win from some offshore gambling outfit, it is up to you to report your winnings... or not.
To support the Submitter/Editor's assertion that online gambling is similar to prohibition: Politicians caved in to the Prohibitionists because income from the relatively new income tax (just 7 years old) made it possible for the Federal Gov't to do without the cash from liquor taxes.
Prohibition ended in 1934, because income taxes tanked ~60% during the first few years of the great depression.
To summarize: Because (1) the tax revenues wouldn't be that large/needed and/or (2) Congress can't figure out how to enforce taxes, they will continue to 'ban' online gambling. Once 1 &/or 2 gets changes, they'll reconsider.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Is the Prohibition of the 21st Century.
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.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
What's an international company supposed to do to keep americans from using their freedom? They ask if you're from the US. They tell you to check and see if it's legal to do what you're doing there. Are they supposed to visit you?
The guy at my deli never asks for ID when I buy lottery tickets and all the bingo I played as a kid at church was when I was under 18... but you let one american bet the Packer's to win the SuperBowl and bam! You're in jail.
We have a goverment that outlaws things so they can profit from doing it themselves. When the Mega-Millions jackpot is $25 million, you know how much money they make? Let's just say the goverment is taking more than half before showing you that number.
There seems to be a fair bit of confusion as to how the United States would have jurisdiction in this matter. Without getting too much into specifics, I'll quickly address this.
... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations." International commerce with the US necessarily would involve some activities that occur outside of the US. But since the people engaging in those activities are engaged in commerce with us, they fall under the scope of what Congress can regulate. It's not necessary for them to physically be in the US at the time, for if it were, that wouldn't be international commerce; it would be wholly domestic.
The Constitution provides Congress with "Power
In this case, the person apparently set up a server in the UK and used it to conduct business with people in the US. Furthermore, in doing so, he apparently violated US laws which prohibit people from engaging in this form of commerce where it involves the US, regardless of where the person happens to be while doing it.
The same sort of thing occurs regularly within the US. For example, if a person in Maine has a website which is part of a business, buying or selling something (as opposed to being merely informational), then they are engaging in interstate commerce nationwide. An Alaskan user who buys something from their site has engaged in commerce with them, and now the person in Maine is subject to Alaskan law. This is the price of doing business with people across borders in our legal system: the differing laws on both sides of the border apply, because the transaction as a whole is occuring in both, not just in one or the other.
The actual situation is a bit more complex than this, but this is the gist of it.
If the person who was arrested doesn't wish to get in more trouble in the future, then he's going to either need to comply with US law, or stop doing business that crosses the US border. Or he can try to avoid going to the US or having assets in the US so that he simply stays outside of our reach, despite violating our laws. (N.b. that airspace counts: there are plenty of instances of people flying on planes, and getting served while crossing the airspace of a particular jurisdiction, by someone that followed them on the plane and waited for the right moment. Landing in that jurisdiction isn't required.)
In any case, this isn't much of an example of our stretching ourselves. If you want to see that, I'd suggest looking at the Alien Tort Claims Act. Personally, I don't have a problem with that, or with our general approach to this.
To those who would argue that repressive countries such as China or Saudi Arabia could try the same thing for basically innocuous things like pointing out how repressive they are (as opposed to something arguably more serious, such as illegally running gambling operations), let's remember that they are repressive countries and thus no one should ever want to go there until they clean up their act. As many idiotic and downright evil things as the US has been doing lately (or historically), we're not quite that bad, and I hope we're soon to get significantly better.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.