Gambline and credit

If it is a debt, and you owe it, they can legally report it.

Why are you signing up for stuff you can't afford?

 

A friend of mine gambles at a casino here.She has written checks for 1,000.00 and did not have the money in her account.She figured she would win and deposit the money into her account the next day.Well she lost the 1,000 and now is worrying what will happen to her when the two checks she wrote bounce.She has written checks in the past but was always able to come up with the money in time but not this time.She cant find anyone to loan her the money like she could in the past.She thinks she will be charged with a crime i told her i dont know what happens to people that bounce checks.Could she be arrested if she cant come up with the money in time?

 

exactly. if you can't afford to gamble don't do it..or at least get better at it ;-)

 

Were the checks written to the casino?

Whether or not she is arrested, she needs to find a Gambler's Anonymous group. If she is writing checks hoping to pay for them by winnings, she is not a good loan candidate.

 

Not sure where your friend lives, but here in Michigan, passing a bad check for $1,000 will get you a 2-year FELONY and/or a $2,000 fine.

http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(2w...eg.aspx?page=getObject&objectName=mcl-750-131

 

I still can't have much sympathy for any casino that gets stuck with a bad check from a customer. They know and depend on many of their customers being gambling addicts, and of all businesses, they knew the risk, and accepted the check fully aware of that risk.

That may not affect the legal criminality of passing a bad check to a casino, but it might affect the likely penalty, or whether the casino prefers to push the matter civilly or criminally. They might prefer to collect via traditional debt collection companies, with the courts as a backup threat.

Customers willing to gamble their last dollar can be good business.

 

Justifying a person's act of felony larceny (uttering a financial instrument with the intent to defraud) by saying, "the casino depends on their customers being addicts" is ridiculous.

Somewhere, somebody's wife is a "shop-a-holic". She wrote numerous checks to the local "Shop-A-Lot", knowing full well that there was no money to cover them.

Somewhere, somebody's brother is an alcoholic. He wrote numerous checks to the local watering hole, knowing full well that there was no money to cover them.

Somewhere, somebody's sister is a nymphomaniac. She wrote numerous checks to ......... aww, come on, get your mind out of the gutter!

Point being: A crime (felony uttering with intent to defraud) is a crime, and a victim (casino) is a victim.

Around these parts, we call it "personal responsibility and accountability" ...

 

It is not about justifying.

In fact, I would have no problem with any court convicting and sentencing any such gambler to payment of restitution, including as terms of probation that they not go into any casino or engage in gambling of any sort. I cannot justify incarceration, however, at public expense, simply because it would be a waste of public money that would produce no public benefit.

In fact, I am not happy about any of the other costs of gambling pushed off onto society for which I, as a taxpayer, end up paying. How much wellfare do I end up paying for, or higher prices from merchants, or higher interest rates for credit, due to bad debts from customers who have instead paid gambling debts? I am not happy about the wellfare subsidies diverted to liquor stores and drug dealers either.

Casinos know that many of their customers may not be able to pay for the costs of their gambling. How much should I, as a taxpayer, be willing to support the court costs for such prosecutions, when the "victim" knew the higher risk of accepting such a check from their customers, took that risk, and now asks me, thru my taxes, to cover part of what are really their costs of doing business, their debt collection costs?

The casinos also know that their real incremental losses from accepting a bad check are limited, since the marginal cost of providing their gambling "services" is negligible, unlike a business that provides a product that you walk out the door with and gets stuck with a bad check. They can thus rationally take a far larger nominal monetary risk than a normal business, knowing that the risk to their bottom line is in fact limited.

Regardless of the form of "payment", the reality is that when they allowed gambling based on accepting a check before that check cleared, in economic terms, they were extending credit, and since that extension of credit was for the clear purpose of gambling, they knew they might not be able to get paid and were willing to run that risk. That extension of credit didn't just walk out the door, however, since they won it back, anyway.

The payment could have been made via a credit card, shoving that risk onto another lender. The credit card companies know that charges for gambling may place their accounts at higher risk for loss, and they assess higher fees to cover such risk.

Knowing the risks of non-payment better than anyone else, the casinos are in the best position to make the decision about what form of payment they choose to accept from their customers. In this case they chose to accept a check, knowing that at whatever rate those checks bounced, they could afford to accept that loss based on the likelyhood other checks accepted would clear. It is just a pragmatic business decision, made for pragmatic reasons, just as is my reluctance to support aggressive prosecution of their customers. Hence, I have no sympathy for the victim.

Their business will neither succeed or fail based on whether their customers who pass bad checks are prosecuted, and neither will the rest of society.

As to whether their customers were "responsible and accountable", in my view if they were they wouldn't be in a casino in the first place.

 

Yet, with this summary statement ...

... you are doing just that.

The casino is "the public". The reasonable person would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to utter a financial document from the confines of a lockup. The benefit: Fewer checks being passed on to the public.

The expense of incarceration should be passed on to the person BEING incarcerated. It should NOT be passed on to the VICTIM of the crime in the form of MORE bad checks. However, being that we, the taxpayers, do foot the bill, I - for one - would be more than happy to add a percentage to my semi-annual tax bill to ensure that thieves have a place to rest their convicted heads.

A check and the responsibility of writing a check is no different than the ownership and use of an automobile. Driving about the town under the influence of alcohol or drugs while ignoring both the rules of the road and the statutory laws of the state has repercussions. So does uttering a financial document, knowing full well that you do NOT have the balance in the account to cover the check.

Ours is a society built on the rule of law. Break the law, be prepared for the punishment, regardless of what philosophical differences of opinion some others may or may not have regarding the concept of incarceration and whether or not they believe it is beneficial.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. I'll sign off, as there is not much sense in keeping this terribly off-topic thread going any longer ...

 

It is probably pointless to try to extract the costs of incarceration from a gambler writing bad checks to a casino. If they could pay those costs, they could have paid off the check.

However, the costs on the public for prosecution and incarceration are very real, and we should consider whether we are getting our public money's worth in dealing with writers of bad checks to casinos, or whether we would better protect the public by incarcerating meth addicts and drunk drivers. Given our limited court and prison resources, who would you rather have spend the most days in a cell to best protect the public: a drunk driver or meth addict, or someone who wrote a bad check to a casino?

Although we once had debtor's prisons, we have since decided that that was a waste. (In fact, even when there were debtor's prisons, the creditor had to pay for the incarceration of the debtor. Somehow, I doubt the casinos are likely to throw good money after bad.) Even if we still consider the debt valid, the lender's recourse is limited to civil remedies, and as a result, the lender should take care who he lends to.

As far as "reasonable persons", we already know we are not dealing with reasonable persons, and so do the casinos. If they want to contain their losses, they can simply not take checks, or not take them from people who have a record of writing them, just like other merchants.

Unlike other merchants, for whom accepting a bad check may cost them the cost of goods of what the bad check writer purchased, probably around 50% of the pricetag, the casino's cost of goods is far lower, their actual out of pocket loss for running the risk is lower, and they can quite rationally choose to accept checks when no normal merchant would.

As far as containing the damage done by those who write bad checks to casinos, the casinos are entirely capable of acceptably containing their own losses, should they choose to do so, at far lower cost than the costs to the public of the court and prison systems. In fact, they are in a better position to contain those losses than the average merchant or lender.


"The reasonable person would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to utter a financial document from the confines of a lockup. The benefit: Fewer checks being passed on to the public."

The likely periods of incarceration for writing a bad check are not sufficient to protect casinos from the risk of future bad checks from the perpetrator. Regardless of outcome, the casinos are still left to the usual check loss control strategies, tracking names and account numbers of those who have written bad checks, and passing off accounts to debt collectors.


And here is where we come full circle:

What is the likely response of the casino to this bad check?
1) They might press charges.
2) They might use the threat of pressing charges to try to force payment, or at least partial payment.
3) They might pass it off to some debt collector that they use in such cases, to do (2) at arms length.

If you were in their shoes, what would be your first choice?

I would choose (2), then (3), before I would do (1), since (1) costs my time and doesn't get me paid. I would, of course, block any future checks from this individual, probably have no way of blocking their future playing, but if they had future winnings in my casino, I would probably take my debt off the top.

In the end, it isn't about the rule of law, it is about the money.

 

The casino is likely to embark on a course of action which leads to the greatest probability of getting paid which could very well be refering the matter to the local district attorney. The spectre of a criminal prosecution often inspires cooperation in making civil restitution.

The bad checks are likely to be reported to Telecheck and/or SCAN with a subsequent report to Chexsystems making it difficult to write checks and/or open up a bank account.

 

That is probably the case.

But prosecuting occasional bad checks passed to casinos is probably not the DA's highest priority, and the wheels of justice turn very slowly. Assuming the consumer cannot pay immediately, any threat is pretty irrelevant if they don't have the money.

Over the period it would take for this matter to get to court, they may be able to pay, and that time period will probably be determined by when they get the money, not by whether they are being prosecuted or pursued civilly.

The casino's threat to prosecute may be effective if the consumer has some asset (or relative) to liquidate to pay it, but barring that, they may actually be better off setting up some "payment plan" where they start getting paid over time, even maintaining the legal fiction that this was an innocent error. Or they may "suggest" the consumer get it thru a "payday loan".

 

Bad checks.

Most of us understand that gambling is not good in the first place but gambling casinos both on and off the internet are always packed with gamblers. So are most race tracks. They have no shortage of patrons. Same for bingo parlors.

I used to gamble at race tracks and won a lot of money doing it but I also lost a lot of money doing it. In the end I didn't win enough money to make it worth the time and effort even though I won almost every day of the week.

Winning at the race tracks is easy but at the end of a year of daily gambling you will not be likely to end up having won much if anything no matter how good you are for the simple reason that the odds are stacked against you. The more you bet the smaller the odds on the payoff. I've spent as much as $5,000 on a single race but what did I get back? Just a little more than I put into it, maybe a hundred bucks or so because what I did was drive the odds down on the horse to where the payoff was actually almost nothing.

You win today and lose tomorrow. You have to be far above average to break even most of the time.

So about the probability of prosecution. It might happen but more likely is that they will turn it over to a collection agency who might threaten to file criminal charges but won't do it because if they did turn it over to the law they would not collect their fees.

In most cases the prosecutors won't take a hot check prosecution from a 3rd party debt collector in the first place.

So will she get prosecuted by the law? It's anybody's guess but she rolled the dice and took her chances and that is about what she also did when she wrote the hot check.