Pokies Cheat Consumers

April 17, 2007

Pokies Cheat Consumers

A visiting Australian expert says most pokies are an unsafe product that mislead and deceive the consumer.

Tim Falkiner who was formerly the legal officer for the Victorian Casino Control Authority has filed a consumer complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer commission asking them to require the balancing of reels in all pokie machines.

Unbalanced reel pokies are machines that do not have the same number of each symbol on each reel. Most NZ pokies fall into this category.

Mr Falkiner says that unbalanced reel pokie machines are like loaded dice and crooked blackjack decks. They use a combination of asymmetry and concealment. They embody randomness, but cheat because the randomness is biased in a manner the gambler does not suspect.

Mr Falkiner also believes some problem gamblers in Victoria have been wrongfully imprisoned or should have received lesser terms and he suspects the same situation may exist in New Zealand.

While he is in NZ he will be addressing the Law Society with the aim of providing lawyers with arguments and materials on the sentencing of problem gamblers to enable them to appreciate the reduced culpability of many problem gamblers.

Mr Falkiner is in NZ as a guest of the Problem Gambling Foundation and will run a workshop at their staff hui this week.

Problem Gambling Foundation CEO John Stansfield says Mr Falkiner has a message that all NZ'ers need to hear.

"The pokies are not a game. They are designed to take your money off you and are not to fussy about how they do it," he says.

"We need to stop excusing the people who own and operate these machines on the basis they provide community funding and enforce much higher standards of product safety and host responsibility."

ENDS

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