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Failure of FreeLiveBingo.com: No Regulators, Nobody to Help Employees or Players

The parent company of Emotive Solutions, which ran FreeLiveBingo, also owned at least one other online gaming business, an Internet casino called LuckyEightCasino.com that targeted the Asian market. The company had plans to develop many online casinos and real-money bingo sites.

FreeLiveBingo operated from an office in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. It closed abruptly at the end of July.

Few if any of the players ever saw the money they won at the site. But they didn't lose any money, because it was a play-for-free site.

The employees, however, lost days and even weeks of wages. One former employee said a list compiled by a British Columbia official shows a total of CND$81,000 owed to employees.

Emotive Solutions was a member of the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC), which is an industry group based in Vancouver whose mission, in part, is "to establish fair and responsible trade guidelines and practices that enhance consumer confidence in interactive gaming products and services."

Rick Smith, executive director of the IGC, said Friday that Emotive Solutions, the company that operated FreeLiveBingo, was a new member of the organization. He had not heard about the failure of the business.

Smith said Emotive Solutions had been approved June 7 as a member. The company had paid its application fee, he said, but not its annual dues. It's listed as an associate member. (RGT Online is also an associate member.)

Smith said the IGC has no formal mechanism to deal with a situation like this, when a member goes out of business without paying its workers.

"But credibility is an issue," he said. "I'm concerned about the credibility of the industry."

Emotive Solutions ran FreeLiveBingo from the secured fifth floor of an office building in Burnaby, which also housed the site's Web server.

RGT Online was unable to locate the owners or top officers of the business. Phone calls to the Burnaby office are answered by someone who says the only people there are security staff, and who claims he has no idea how to contact the owners.

Smith said Emotive Solutions' membership application listed Jaswinder Parmar as chief operating officer and Sara Vatkin as the person in charge of marketing. Vatkin told RGT Online that she had no role in management decisions.

Former employees said Parmar and Sakwinder Narwal, the chief executive, were in charge and were there nearly every day.

The chief financial officer was David Naylor. The employees didn't know if he also held an ownership interest. Narwal's sister-in-law, Paulie Dhillion, was the office manager and head of human resources, the employees said.

Emotive Solutions used to be a gaming software developer called Cyberweb Systems. It was purchased in July 1999 by Omicron Technologies. In April of this year, as beta testing began for FreeLiveBingo, Omicron changed the name of Cyberweb Systems to Emotive Solutions.

Also in July 1999, Omicron launched an online casino aimed at the Asian market. It had a licensing agreement for the Lucky Eight Casino with Global Interactive, a company based in St. Kitts.

Global Interactive is a licensee of Starnet Communications, a major developer of gaming software and e-cash services for online casinos. Global Interactive, in turn, sublicenses casinos to other operators.

It's not clear if the Lucky Eight Casino is still in business. Officials at Global Interactive refused to return phone calls, and an email to the webmaster at the casino came back as undeliverable.

Omicron also had its own gaming licensing subsidiary, a company called MaXuM Entertainment Ltd., that was registered in Belize. Last September, it announced the signing of four Internet casino licensing agreements and said it expected to sublicense more than 50 casinos within six months.

In August, 1999, a report from a company hired by Omicron said Omicron expected to have more than $50 million in revenue in the year 2000 from its casino and bingo operations.

Omicron, which may no longer be in business, is or was a publicly traded U.S. company based in Bellingham, Washington, a city just south of the British Columbia border.

In its last filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Omicron said that Barrett Sleeman had resigned June 9 as a director. He had previously served as president and then chairman of the board.

In March, the company told the SEC that Narwal had resigned as chief financial officer to become president and a director. Naylor took Narwal's place as chief financial officer, and also continued as secretary, treasurer and a director.

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