Where it stops, nobody knows
Gambling has long since crept out of casinos and into such mainstream venues as convenience stores. A profusion of online options now drives it deeper - into workplaces and homes.
After her husband died the day before Christmas in 1997, June L. found herself living alone in her apartment in northern New Jersey.
Cruising the Internet one day, the senior citizen discovered websites where she could play casino games such as blackjack and poker right from her home. At first, she won some of the time. In fact, on four occasions she won $10,000, and it was indeed sent to her.
"They would send me gifts from Antigua and all different places. All kinds of little gifts to keep you going," she explains in a telephone interview. "I'd sometimes get up in the middle of the night to play."
But the winning didn't last. Soon she was maxing out her credit cards to pay for her losses. She ran through a $60,000 insurance settlement, then the rest of her savings.
"I even spent the money for my burial," she says. "I cashed that in, too." Eventually she lost about $110,000 and went bankrupt.
"My children wouldn't even talk with me anymore," she recalls. "They were disgusted with what I was doing. I just couldn't seem to stop myself."
Eventually, she got help from the New Jersey Council on Compulsive Gambling. She hasn't gambled for a year and a half now. Her grown children have reunited with her, her finances have been stabilized, and she has been able to stay in her apartment. Though mostly confined there with a number of physical problems, she counsels others via the Internet and phone about the dangers of online gambling.
Despite the horror stories of people like June L. cropping up across the United States, and efforts to regulate the use of credit cards to gamble, the estimated $4 billion per year Internet gambling industry seems set for continued rapid growth.
An estimated 1,800 gambling sites have gone into business since the first one sprang up in 1995. The sites operate from outside the United States, in places such as Antigua, Costa Rica, and the Isle of Man.
The Interstate Wire Act of 1960, which prohibits the sending of gambling information over telephone lines, so far has discouraged companies from setting up shop in the United States. But that act, passed long before the Internet age, may not hold up to legal challenge. A recent appellate court decision affirmed a lower court ruling that the act covers only sports betting.
In recent years several bills have been introduced in Congress to try to address the situation, but nothing has passed.
The policy debate is likely to center around a more clearly defined ban, which would still leave unaddressed the problem of "offshore" sites, versus the nationwide legalization of website gambling along with regulation - the model used with brick-and-mortar casinos in some states.
Reps. Mike Oxley (R) of Ohio, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Rep. Jim Leach (R) of Iowa recently reintroduced a bill that would outlaw the use of credit cards and other bank instruments to finance online gambling.
"We're going to have to have more legislation," says Harold Krent, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who teaches the legal aspects of e-commerce. For one thing, he points out, without regulation it's impossible to know what the real odds of winning are.
Frank Fahrenkopf, president and CEO of the American Gaming Association (AGA), which represents the commercial casino industry in the United States, says the AGA has taken no position yet on federal regulation of Internet gambling. But he says his members remain concerned that today's Internet technology is inadequate to prevent minors and pathological gamblers from playing.
