Stop Predatory Gambling

The biggest nightmare for casinos? No casino ATMs

by spgadmin

Global Cash Access, a Las Vegas company that operates ATM machines in casinos around the country, said Tuesday it’s working to resolve a problem in which about 40,000 customers nationwide were charged for cash withdrawals, but did not receive their cash

No one was likely more upset by this event than the casinos themselves. As we have highlighted before, casinos monitor the ATM activity of their patrons better than most of the patrons themselves.

Here’s one recent example why: 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.

They won’t be the biggest for long if they keep having technical problems with their ATMs because the casinos will lose their primary source of revenue: addicted, out-control people who use these casino ATMs.