Class Action Lawsuit Claims Apple, Google Knowingly Facilitate Online Casino Apps’ Illegal Gambling Scheme

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A proposed class action lawsuit claims Apple, Google and their respective payment processing subsidiaries have knowingly assisted and profited from an illegal gambling scheme involving four online casino apps.

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According to the 41-page lawsuit, the operators of the gaming websites and apps at issue—namely, High 5 Casino, Wow Vegas, CrownCoins Casino and McLuck.com—have fraudulently represented themselves as “social casinos” designed “purely for fun and entertainment” that provide free games of chance such as digital slot machines, blackjack, poker and roulette.

In reality, the class action suit contends, these companies are engaged in a “patently illegal” online casino operation with the help of Apple and Google, which make a tidy profit from app sales in their respective app stores and from subsequent in-app purchases by users.

Per the case, the apps—which are neither licensed as casinos nor beholden to any casino regulator—entice consumers to play by issuing an initial allotment of free virtual tokens called, for example, “game coins” or “gold coins,” which can be used to wager on various games. After a user loses their free tokens, they are prompted to buy more if they wish to continue gameplay, the complaint says.

Importantly, the apps also award consumers with sweepstakes tokens, or “sweeps coins,” that can be redeemed for cash, gift cards, cryptocurrency and other prizes with actual monetary value, the filing explains.

These sweepstakes awards effectively turn the purportedly free “social casino” apps into unauthorized and illegal interstate gambling operations “in all but name,” the lawsuit claims.

“By awarding sweepstakes tokens that have real value, the [defendants’] websites and apps—deceptively marketed to the public as harmless ‘social’ casinos—are, for all intents and purposes, unlawful Internet casinos operating … without any authorization to do so,” the suit charges.

What’s more, the app operators “rarely, if ever,” honor the promise to redeem the sweeps coins for any kind of valuable prize, the case alleges. As the complaint tells it, the companies typically reject player requests to redeem their sweepstakes tokens for money or other awards for “arbitrary and largely contrived reasons.”

“In short, what begins as a straightforward ‘pay to play’ social casino quickly morphs into an illicit gambling site, where users are paying real money to play games of chance in the hopes of winning an arbitrary financial windfall,” the filing asserts. “The sale of game coins is simply a pretext to entice users to win sweeps coins, in what amounts to an unlawful, unauthorized casino—the exact type of illicit gambling operation prohibited by state and federal law.”

The suit alleges that Apple and Google are implicit in the scheme, as the tech heavyweights facilitate app sales and downloads from their respective platforms and reap up to 30 percent of any in-app purchases made by players.

The online gambling lawsuit looks to represent anyone in New Jersey who paid and lost money by wagering in any online sweepstakes casino operated by the defendants, including High 5 Casino, Wow Vegas, CrownCoins Casino and McLuck.com, with the assistance and participation of Apple, Google or one of their payment subsidiaries.

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