Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 7, 1995 TAG: 9506070056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
There's no flashing neon, no floor show, no musically clinking coins when you pull the handle on a slot machine in cyberspace.
Instead, the computer mouse in the quiet room goes clickety-click. And the lemon, the grapes and the banana blink onto the screen, with a message that says, ``You lost!''
Vegas, it's not. But a number of entrepreneurs are hoping to bring the thrill of casino gambling to the Internet - an idea that may be illegal, but also hard to stop.
Millions of people could boot up, log on and gamble from their homes, says Warren Eugene, an entrepreneur from Toronto who plans to open one casino. ``Eventually, the numbers will be astronomical,'' he says.
When Eugene's plans were announced this spring, the U.S. Justice Department said they might break several federal laws. Spokesman Joe Krovisky says, ``Until we actually see it, nobody will know if there are violations or not.''
Gambling has already begun to occupy some people in cyberspace, with lottery results and tourist information on Las Vegas posted on the Internet, and games such as poker or blackjack available, though without wagering.
Now, the entrepreneurs say, they're going to offer real gambling - where people can lose real money.
Eugene has already erected some of his Caribbean Casino on the Internet. Its garish, cartoon-embellished pages promise, ``You can win big'' or ``Gamble from home in comfort on Sunday morning in your pajamas.''
He claims he will eventually set up his computers in the Netherlands Antilles on the island of St. Maarten, offering everything from blackjack to roulette to pachinko.
Professor I. Nelson Rose, an expert in gambling law at Whittier Law School in Los Angeles, says a 1960s law makes it illegal to use a wire that crosses a state or national boundary to transmit information to aid in the placing of bets.
That would make running the Internet casinos illegal, he says. Some states also have laws that might make it a crime for people to place bets.
But if the casinos set up offshore, linked to the Internet only by phone lines or satellites, the casino operators might get away with it, he says.
If the casinos do arrive on line, there may be other problems down the line.
``With people playing it from their living rooms ... with no sense of the amount of money they're losing, it could rapidly become a serious problem throughout the nation,'' says Richard Thompson, a reformed compulsive gambler and a consultant to the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling.
It doesn't matter whether the ``casino'' is just a home computer, Thompson says.
``For a compulsive gambler,'' he says, ``it isn't so much the atmosphere, it's the action.''
by CNB