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As someone who has no idea what is going on in Pennsylvania state politics, I'm surprised you expected someone to try and bail these guys out. Legal gambling is a lot less popular nowadays than it was even a couple of years ago. The double-whammy of """daily fantasy sports""" and "prediction" markets means that the fig leaf of plausible deniability is now completely gone.
I'm not surprised that there has been no action, but I figured somebody in the state legislature would go to bat. Pace-O-Matic is certainly capable of buying legislators, but sitting ones were already bought by the casinos. They had to resort to funding unsuccessful primary challengers, so even those without a horse in the race may have been resentful that their colleagues were getting picked off. But industry influence aside, there are a lot of small businesses owners that made decent income on them with no risk; they weren't responsible for owning or leasing the machines, and the vendors serviced them. It was basically free money, and I assumed that someone would have stepped up, especially with the prospect of additional tax revenue on the table. While gambling has lost support, the machines aren't so controversial that anyone but dedicated gambling opponents has strong enough feelings about them for it to matter.
As an industry participant the amount of absolutely insane gambling products that have somehow either gone unpunished or taken a decade or so for regulators to spin up anything is insane.
Chumba Casino/'Sweepstakes Casinos' are something that really should have been wrapped up inside a month but snowballed into billion dollar businesses, for example. Online Casino operations setup on Facebook which operate with the loophole that you're not depositing funds. You're buying $100 'Chumbabucks' with your $100 purchase, and then a free promotion fires where you get $100 'Chumbabucks Gold' with each of those purchases. 'Chumbabucks Gold' can be redeemed for USD (after a minimum turnover) but legally since you got them as a promotional bonus it's not technically real money gambling.
^ this loophole was essentially available in every US state for a while and is taking a decade to slowly get banned with occasional light-medium punishments for the operators that made literal billions.
Agreed, these kind of obvious loopholes should be closed immediately. I remember that back in the day there was some regulation that forbade bars to sell loose cigarettes. Enterprising bar owners created a bundle of matches+cigarette and the idea was that the customer bought overpriced matches and got the loose cigarettes for free as a gift, so technically cigarettes were not sold. This was stamped out quite quickly.
Yeah. There's been a plethora of these in gambling history. The Pachinko loophole in Japan's been going forever but seems to have reached a level of cultural inertia where nobody's really giving it meaningful pushback any more. There was a previous one in the USA where you could essentially buy 'lan cafe minutes' then gamble them at 'internet cafes' in certain states with potential to then refund your balance into cash, which got absolutely smote after a year or two. There's still laws on it on the books of many states that could be modified to cover the Sweepstakes Casino model within a single session, but somehow the will just hasn't existed.
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