I just heard (from a skilled gambler who shall remain nameless) that a friend of his saw a well-known “promotion scrambler” get handcuffed and taken in the back at the 4 Queens casino sometime last month. “He was working several peoples’ cards on their promotion--the same promotion that you wrote about in your blog. Evidently he was paying people to use their cards.”

This report does not surprise me. There is a small number of players who not only feel that “all is fair in love and war” but in casinos too. And juicy promotions can bring out the greed big time. A big slot club signing bonus going on? Gather up some of the homeless and bring them to the casinos – pay them a little bit and take the biggest chunk of the bonus for yourself. A big check-cashing bonus promotion going on? Get your non-player friends to cash their paychecks at that casino and “buy” the valuable bonus coupon they get.

I have been writing about ethics and gambling ever since I had a whole chapter subtitled “Strange Bedfellows” on that subject back in my first book, The Frugal Gambler. Here’s what I wrote in the section called “The Casino as a War Zone”: “After I’d been gambling for awhile, I realized that very little in a casino is black and white, ethically speaking. Going into a casino is kind of like entering a war zone. It’s you against the house, and it starts to seem like the house has a license to steal. So if you get a chance to steal something back, you rationalize that it’s only fair. When I started thinking that way, I knew I had to formulate my code of casino ethics. I’m not going to tell you what that entire code is, because it’s a personal thing. You’ll have to come up with you own code if you intend to ‘fight’ in this battle zone.”

I went on to say that my code is always being tested -- and that is still true today because gambling ethical issues are still in a large gray area. But I must warn you that casinos ARE taking measures to ferret out those that they feel are abusing the system.

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