Stop Predatory Gambling

I know what Sam Adams would do with a casino ATM

by spgadmin

Yesterday a woman was arrested at the Sands Casino in Bethlehem, PA for stealing from the ATM accounts of casino visitors. She obviously did not know that casinos monitor the ATM activity of their patrons better than most of the patrons themselves.

Here’s one example. Penn National was recently fined $800,000 in Illinois for marketing to problem gamblers who had voluntarily banned themselves from entering a casino– a self-exclusion list. What was Penn National’s defense? As part of a campaign to develop new customers, the casino rented a list of names from a firm that operates ATM machines at Illinois casinos and the casino’s marketing department failed to check the list against the names of people enrolled in the Self-Exclusion Program.

But why does Penn National and casinos like it aggressively market to gamblers who take money out of casino ATMs? Because these gamblers are the ones most likely to lose control of their spending. They lost the money they arrived with at the casino and then needed to withdraw more of their savings to chase the money they lost earlier.

 And these out-of-control gamblers are the lifeline for the predatory gambling trade’s business model. According to a recent book about the trade by a Wall Street Journal reporter, 90% of the gambling profits come from 10% of the gamblers.

 The casinos want to be able claim they don’t know who these lucrative, out-of-control people are so they “outsource” the casino ATM operations to another vendor, the biggest of which is Global Cash Access. The attorneys who just filed this class action suit against Global Cash Access for deceptive transaction fees should consider taking the same action against the predatory business practices highlighted above.

 If Sam Adams, the ringleader of the American Revolution, was alive today he might call this whole scheme “taxation by exploitation.” And you and I both know what he would do with a casino ATM.