"We
have invited the FBI several times to take a look around in Second
Life and raise any concerns they would like, and we know of at
least one instance that federal agents did look around in a virtual
casino," Linden Lab's vice president Ginsu Yoon told the Reuters
news agency. Linden Lab operates the phenomenally successful online
service.
There are hundreds of casinos operating in Second Life, but
Linden Lab said that it had not received clear guidance on gambling
within the game.
Second Life has its own currency, the Linden Dollar, 250 of
which are worth just one dollar.
The US Department of Justice has been operating a crackdown on
internet gambling. It used a 1961 Act outlawing inter-state
telephone betting whose application to online gambling was disputed
until last autumn when a new anti-gambling law was passed.
After
attempts at passing anti-online gambling laws were opposed in the
Senate the US administration added the Unlawful Internet Gambling
Enforcement Act to an existing ports security bill which was
certain to be passed. The law was passed just before the end of the
Congressional session before mid-term elections.
Linden Lab's Yoon said that he believed that the case against
Second Life gambling was not cut and dried. "It's not always clear
to us whether a 3-D simulation of a casino is the same thing as a
casino, legally speaking, and it's not clear to the law enforcement
authorities we have asked," Yoon said.
US law enforcement agencies scored a notable success earlier
this week when they arrested Gary Kaplan, the founder of UK-based
online betting firm BetOnSports. Kaplan had long been wanted on
racketeering charges and is also likely to face prosecution under
the new gambling law.
The US received a rebuke this week for its gambling laws,
though, when the World Trade Organisation ruled that its laws were
anti-competitive because they treated US companies differently to
ones based offshore.
