Online Casinos Enforcing Age Restrictions?
A frequent debate in the online casino gambling industry centers on the minimum
age limit for players on the internet. The United States has some of the most
jacked-up gambling laws in the world right now (something many are hoping will
be remedied by the Obama administration) and with all of the confusion
surrounding the legality of gambling at the online casinos, the question of age
restrictions becomes a whole other issue really. A professor of law at Whittier
Law School in California, Nelson Rose, notes contends that there is really no
clear answer to that question and that even the government couldn’t answer the
minimum age question with brevity and without hedging.
The fact of the matter is this, land gambling in the US is a completely
different medium from online casino gambling and is held to different rules. The
US is trying to harness in the industry by a complete banning of online casino
gambling from offshore online casinos, but that has proven ineffective and made
internet gamblers in California and other states head to the black market of
sorts for their games. And without control anymore over the online casino
gambling habits in the US, the age restrictions are set at whatever that site
believes is right.
The international nature of the online casino gambling industry means that
companies that are offering games of chance to US players have entirely
different age requirements – and there is no way that they could hope to comply
with US minimum age restrictions because they don’t exist. So, in short, if you
can get a site to accept you as a member with a valid credit card you can likely
play at the online gambling site with few repercussions…of course a couple of US
states have gone so far as to criminalize internet gambling, and that is a whole
other issue as well. |