Advantage play / cheating / crime....where is the line?

[unowme]

You guys are getting all fancy and technical. The mistake made was when they tried to make it into a "hacking case". It wasn't a hacking case. The judge was right, nobody hacked anything. The case that it should have been was a case about theft. This was the big mistake. They didn't need to make it about any more than that. They accepted money under false pretenses (that they had won it playing higher stakes than they actually had). legally....THAT is theft.

Oh come on. If it was really 'theft' or 'cheating' it would have been prosecuted in Nevada. They don't take kindly to stealing from a Casino in Las Vegas. Tell us your theory as to why they were guilty of theft but weren't prosecuted in Nevada? My guess it that no crime matched what they did.

They played the machine and the machine grossly overpaid them. That's a malfunction and the Casino didn't have to pay them. But they did. The players didn't have any inside knowledge. They didn't open the machine, steal chips, cap a bet, mark cards or anything commonly called cheating. They played the game and it overpaid them. The Manufacturer should have done a better job of testing before they ever put a flawed gaming device in a Casino. It's like if you found a dealer that kept paying everybody double on blackjacks because he's an idiot. Do you think they'd arrest you for theft? Nope. They'd fix the machine...I mean fire the dealer.....because it's not your problem if THEY don't pay you correctly...and it's certainly not criminal.

They weren't prosecuted in Nevada because the feds took over the case. And the Feds charged Nestor and Kane with conspiracy and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Passed in 1986, the CFAA was enacted to punish hackers who remotely crack computers related to national defense or banking. (taken from the article). And that is just weird. I mean this clearly had nothing to do with national defense or banking. Being a new kind of case, they really screwed it up. The charge should have been theft or something related to that, NOT the hacking angle.

The Feds 'took over the case' is no excuse. You can be convicted of state crimes and federal crimes for exactly the same offense or for different crimes arising with the same facts. If Nevada thought they had a case for theft, they would have prosecuted it....especially after the federal charges were dropped. The bottom line is that it wasn't criminal. It was a machine malfunction that they took advantage of. The Casinos should have withheld payment. Game King shouldn't have made a machine that fucked up the payoffs. Just like dealers shouldn't expose their hole cards. There's a big difference between taking advantage of a dealer or machine error and capping a bet or using slugs.

[unowme]

Oh. Here's another one. You find a truly biased roulette wheel and exploit the Hell out of it over a period of months. Casinos have been taken for millions because of this in the distant past. Should you be arrested for theft? Of course not. It's the Casino's responsibility to make sure their games are working properly...not yours. How is that different that a malfunctioning Video Poker machine? I don't think it is.