Lucrative Underground Gambling Dupe Uses Cunning Wordsmithing To Circumvent Gambling Laws And Continues To Prey On Low Income Neighborhoods
I can’t help but sigh in discouragement as I drive by and see a new “ Busters Arcade” opened in a small, local strip mall in my neighborhood between a liquor store and an old record shop.
When you think of an arcade you may have tokens and kids with handfuls of tickets, Mario Brothers, pinball or pac-man sounds fill the room, but these deceptive “arcades” are usually guarded at the door by a bouncer and inside are arcade like video cabinets with flashing lights to get your attention and they are loaded with software rendering games “of skill” they call them. In reality these are little casinos that found a sneaky way into your back yard without the hinderance of gambling laws and bringing all sorts of trouble.
It started with “Internet sweepstakes parlors” cropped up all over America around 10 years or so ago. The usual set up was a room full of computers and each had an individual monitor and seat. With the monitors turned off it could look the same as a public school computer lab might look in the late 1990s. Visually unappealing at best.
You would walk up to the window and there would be a single employee there to “cash out” and “add credits” to your account, attached to a pin number you select at registration or associated by your phone number, not too unlike grocery store loyalty programs. You hand the cashier your money, its loaded onto your account and you make your way to a computer where you enter your pin & select from any number of slot like games with silly cartoon characters that made obnoxious noises representing different levels of play.
Slot machines played on a computer screen there was no arm to pull to spin, now you used a mouse, you would click to choose your bet size and when you were finished and if you were lucky enough to have money left to cash out, it would print you a slip to present to cashier on your way out.
There were the first of “sweepstakes parlors” “Internet sweepstakes cafes” or “computer prize depot” A modern dreary gambling facility that relied wholly on the loophole that the games you were playing were based on skill, not chance, and “skilled gaming” was born and it has the same aim as any casino, take your money.
But the real money didn’t start for a few years until the highly addictive and more modern “Fish Table Games” hit the skilled gaming scene and then the “computer depots” were now crammed in back and these flashy, multi-player, shooter style games where you kill different species of fish for “random” payouts.
The popularity spread fast and hard through America, cropping up all over our inner cities and always in the lower income neighborhoods, cleverly next to bars, liquor stores, check cashing establishments. In less than 60 seconds you can effortlessly burn through 20 dollars at these 6 or 8 player tables and fling bullets at multicolored fish prices at 10 cents a bullet. This is putting conservative constraints on your joystick gun to begin with. 1 dollar shots are normal and people hit that button labeled “shoot” as fast as they physically can. You canfigure how profitable even one of these tables might be.
Not surprisingly, each game and each table’s pay outs are controlled by the owner of the table who has exclusive rights to modify the payouts as they please. Their profits stem from intermittent reinforcement and preys on people’s neurobiological impulses to keep them eager to pour their paychecks into these machines and keep on doing so, even as the payouts defy common sense and negatively impact their lives.
These are predatory games ran by business owners who have little concern about how they are obtaining their revenue.
I find it an abhorrent way to make money, and I have personally seen people, families destroyed by a persons compulsion to flush every last penny they have at these fish, swearing that they “figured out the algorithm” and this time, they will kill the golden fish. Instigated further when a neighbor seated next to them “hits” for $700 and while that seems hefty, odds are they have already sunk far more than that into that day’s play.
Even sneakier to keep with this petty arcade facade, they would use swipe cards to access your cash/points/bullets at the table. If you were lucky enough to have money to cash out, you would have a slip printed that would be cashed out in another building, not even on the same premises as the parlor, sometimes under the guise of “crypto currency exchange desk” where you would get buzzed in after standing in line.
You might be thinking to yourself, “this doesn’t sound safe at all” and you are right, these are notoriously dangerous places.
These gambling dens are targeted by desperate people with guns who either hold up individuals as they leave the pay out room, or hold up the entire parlor. Robbery at gunpoint is a daily reality for those who work in these all but innocent “arcades”, many of whom openly carry firearms themselves if state law allows.
I believe at the core of humanity is good, and a strong drive to do right by one another, so I want to shed light on these dark dens and maybe as we begin to recognize them for what they are, and hopefully one day, these game rooms will be forced to play fair.
At the least, I don’t want one of these “skilled gaming parlor computer prize chance fish slot table” places in my neighborhood, do you?
places in my neighborhood at all. Do you?
