Cyber Gamblers Beware: AOL Casino Has More than Its Share of Problems

21 May 1998

Heard of AOL Casino? Probably not, but if you stumble upon this live wagering site and you're considering opening an account, we've got a few tidbits for your mulling pleasure.

For starters, if you've drawn the conclusion that they're affiliated with America Online, you're wrong. That's probably what they want you to believe, for the sake of attaching themselves to a clean image and a household name, but there's absolutely no relationship. (I'll expand on this issue later.)

More important to the consumer, they've been involved in a payment dispute resulting from a possible software glitch that made it past beta testing. (That is, of course, if beta tests were indeed conducted.)

We received a letter on April 3 from a cyber gambler in Sweden who explained that she won more than US$25,000 at AOL Casino and that they refused to pay her. We immediately contacted AOL, an operation apparently based in Germany, and they told us that there was an error in credit card processing. When we informed them that she had a bill providing proof of a transaction, they wrote us back with the following explanation:

On January 13th we debited this amount of money from the user's credit card. During this process an error in our administration software occurred. The software cut the user's credit card number after the fourth digit, i.e. there were only four digits of the credit card number left in our database from that point of time on. Due to there (being) a lot of fake, incorrect or incomplete registrations at the Casino (in fact, there are more of these than honest and correct ones), we delete all of those incorrect registrants and all his data from our database. This is exactly what happened two days later on January 15th.

One day before, on January 14th at about 1 p.m. CET, we replaced our casino software with an updated version. Due to this update the roulette game now permanently hit number 20. At 1:30 p.m. that day the user started to play the roulette game. (Her) credit was $51 at that time. Due to the error in the game (she) 'won' $25,432.00 in 37 games within the next 15 minutes.

At the time we became aware of the error in the game we immediately applied an online scrolling text which appeared in the lower menu of the casino game. The text read that all roulette games of the past hour would not be valid. While we were browsing through the user-database at about 3 p.m. we encountered (her) corrupt credit card number. This account seemed invalid to us and was therefore deleted.

After countless emails bounced every which way between myself, AOL Casino, the customer and Gambler's World Police Department Chief Lewis Gruppo—a seeker of justice to cyber gamblers who are wronged, "Deputy Doom" to those who play dirty—I was able to establish that AOL's account of the situation was accurate.

And the end result: The consumer received the $51 that was owed to her before the software went haywire and the casino apologized for the misunderstanding.

To me, this isn't the evilest of Web gambling injustices—the customer wasn't taken for thousands of dollars and wasn't constantly lied to and given the run-around — but the situation still doesn't sit well. I sympathize with AOL Casino because I realize that they're trying to run a business and that there was probably a legitimate software error, but the customer deserved more sufficient compensation.

Many may recall a few months back when a woman was asked to return $330,000 she had one on a malfunctioning slot machine at Harrah's Ak-Chin Casino in Arizona. It was an ugly situation but, once enough hell was raised, Harrah's did the right thing and awarded her the jackpot. AOL Casino is a much smaller operation and I presume they probably can't afford the $25,000 hit, however, a gesture of a few grand could have been made, and they were given the opportunity to do so.

And if this mishap doesn't prove them to be a shaky service at best, they've managed to involve themselves in a few other controversies. In case you were wondering how they managed to get away with using the name "AOL," they haven't. Rolling Good Times has learned that America Online has sent a cease and desist letter to the company for what they consider to be a trademark infringement. A spokesperson from the real AOL made it clear that they don't want to be associated to the online casino in any way.

AOL Casino is no stranger to this kind of heat. Their software provider, ABC Software (which is under the same ownership) is facing a law suit filed by Circus Circus Enterprises for copyright infringement. The two websites under fire are AOL Casino, which uses graphics of pyramids and a sphinx, resembling Circus Circus' Luxor hotel and casino themes, and a site called "Circus Casino.de," which uses a big-top circus theme like that of Circus Circus Hotel and Casino.

Are the folks at AOL Casino the root of all that is evil in this universe? Not necessarily, but they've had more than their share of problems, so I recommend you keep your distance.