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Crackdown Just an Irritant to 'Net Gamblers22 March 2004NEW YORK – As reported by the New York Times: ``Ben sleeps five hours a night; the rest of the time he sits at his desk in his Brooklyn apartment playing online poker. He won $55,000 one recent evening, but in his tireless ambition for the $2.5 million world championship, this mild-mannered college graduate has become an outlaw in hiding and a twisting thorn in the side of Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general. ``Ben quit his teaching job five months ago and now makes around $100 an hour. Five days a week, he clocks 10-hour shifts of Texas Hold 'Em on his Dell laptop computer. ``…Since 2002, Spitzer (New York attorney general) has succeeded in getting more than 10 major financial institutions, including Citibank and PayPal, one of the largest Internet money transfer companies, to stop processing gambling transactions. But he has been unable to prosecute the website operators, most of whom are offshore, and hard pressed to arrest online gamblers because they are dispersed all over. Instead, he has tried to seal off the financial pipeline connecting the two. ``…Spitzer decided to clamp down on the industry in 1999 after his office won a precedent-setting case involving an Internet casino. The website's operators, World Interactive Gaming Corp., based in Suffolk County, N.Y., claimed they should not be subject to New York gambling laws, since their Internet servers were licensed in Antigua. However, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Caribbean location was irrelevant, since the actual transmission of information from New York via the Internet constituted gambling activity within the state. ``…This ruling may, in the long run, doom New York online bettors, said Ken Dreifach, chief of the state attorney general's Internet bureau…" |