The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago has upheld a ruling by Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. District Court for Southern Illinois, which dismissed lawsuits against parties operating poker sites. Posner noted attempts to stop illegal gambling through civil court actions was futile. “Creating legal remedies for gambling losses as a way to discourage gambling seems a lost cause,” he wrote.
The 2012 case involved Kelly Sonnenberg and her son, Casey Sonnenberg, and Judy Fahrner and her son, Daniel Fahrner. Each pair filed putative class-action suits in St. Clair County Circuit Court. The Sonnenbergs sued the gambling website PokerStars and the Fahrners sued website Full Tilt Poker to recover money the young men lost wagering on the websites. Plaintiffs claimed the Illinois Loss Recovery Act allows any person to sue the winner in an illegal gambling operation for triple the amount another person lost if that amount was at least $50.
The amounts Casey and Daniel lost were not specified, however the lawsuits indicated they both lost more than $50. However, the plaintiffs claimed thousands of people lost millions of dollars on the websites, which were shut down by the federal government in 2011.
In 2013, the lawsuits were moved in 2013 to Southern Illinois’ federal court in East St. Louis where, in 2015, District Judge David R. Herndon granted the defendants’ motions for dismissal since plaintiffs had failed to show how much money they lost, when they lost it and who won it. The cases were consolidated and plaintiffs appealed to the Seventh Circuit, where arguments were heard last November.
Posner noted the law does allow gambling losses to be recovered from the person who won the money. However, in the case at hand, the defendants did not win the money and had no stake in the games’ outcome; they simply raked off a portion of the pot as their commission for sponsoring the online poker games. In addition, the judge disagreed with plaintiffs’ contention a civil cause of action would deter potential operators of illegal gambling sites from running such sites. Posner said criminal penalties for running illegal sites in Illinois should be enough to get people to comply with the law, especially since first offenses are considered misdemeanors.
Posner concluded, “A gambler knows that the money he puts in the pot is at risk. It is not a risk he has to take; he takes it because he hopes to win the pot, or simply because he likes gambling or risk taking in general. If he loses $50 he may well say to himself, ‘I’d rather have won, but $50 wasn’t too high a price to pay for a night of gambling, and en route to losing $50 I did after all win some nice pots and get compliments from the guys I was playing with.’”
