Online Gambling

USA just passed a law making it illegal for credit card companies to pay money to online gambling sites.

Online gambling sites are already illegal in the USA , and are mostly found in europe. 50% of their customers, however , are in the usa.

The online gambling sites are terribly terribly upset about this, saying that this is no way to solve the gambling addiction of people, you should regulate the issue. Of course they're currently sitting in europe thumbing their noses at any attempt by the US to regulate them in any way shape or form.

I work in tech support, internet connection for residential customers ( I won't say which company). I get calls all the time about internet gambling. The usual complaint ?

If you disconnect from the gambling server, you forfiet all funds. Odd, the "practice" server that only plays for pretend money almost never disco's. The "live" server that plays for actual US cash ? Disco's about every 30 seconds, and the player loses it all , and complains to us for lousy service. And we have to explain to them point blank that since it's only the live server going down and not the practice, they are being ripped off.

Lets not mince words.
Online gambling is illegal for a reason.
And that reason is because the operators are theives and pirates.
And the reason is because it is just SOOOOO easy to rip people off from the other side of the world and then listen to their local cops say "I'm sorry , but he's not here, he's in some other country ..."

You wanna gamble ? Show up in person at the casino. Those guys mess up , you can take them to court. Some guy on the other side of the world ? He'll just thumb his nose at you and move on to the next sucker.