According to investigators with the Riverside County sheriff’s department, a Southern California woman lied to deputies on August 9. On that date, she reported that a man ransacked her room and attacked her with a knife while attempting to sexually assault her. She said she was able to fight him off and gave a description.

The investigators noticed inconsistencies in the woman’s story, though. After they questioned her, the woman, who has not been identified, admitted to making up the story. She did it to hide the fact that she had lost money at a California tribal casino, though the amount lost is also unknown. Details about the extent of her gambling problems, if any, have not been disclosed.

The case has been referred to the prosecutors, who will decide whether to press charges against the woman for filing a false police report. Whether they do or not, this is a good time to reiterate that you should never wager money that you can’t afford to lose. If you need to commit a crime and concoct a story about a sexual assault and burglary, then that is a good indication that you shouldn’t wager the money. In that case, it’s best to not go to the casino. Responsible gambling is important at any casino, online and offline.

The U.S. economy, the largest in the world, is in bad shape because the government spends more money than it takes in. It doesn’t take a genius to know that is not good. Some of the spending is justified, though, as “investments” that will bring in more money in the future. There are no guarantees for the future, though. That’s where some gamblers make a mistake.

Sometimes people will take out a line of credit at a brick and mortar casino or make a deposit on an online casino with a credit card. The thinking is that they will make the money back and then some, so it’s okay to spend money they don’t currently have. Sometimes those players lose, though. In fact, the house edge says that you are more likely to lose than win.

For that reason, we at Gambling Review advise that you never spend money that you can’t afford to lose. If losing a wager will cause any kind of hardship, don’t make that wager. That means you should especially not wager with money you don’t have. With a credit card, it can lead to pay for it long term, which makes it cost more from the interest payments. With a loan, it can mean committing a crime once your check bounces. In any case, all gamblers should learn from the U.S. government. Bad fiscal policy will eventually catch up to you, no matter who you are.

Back in September of 2004, Jimmy Vance signed a credit contract with Horseshoe Southern Indiana, then called Caesars casino. He drank seven bourbons and signed seven credit markers, totaling $75,000. When the markers bounced, the casino sued Vance in an attempt to recoup the money he owed them. Vance then countersued, saying that because he was intoxicated, he could not enter into a legal contract with the casino. He says that the casino should not have allowed him to borrow money because he was drunk.

The casino contends that there was no evidence that Vance was intoxicated and that he was clearly sober when he signed the credit contract. That’s pretty impressive for a guy who rank seven bourbons. In 2005, a Harrison Circuit Court ruled in favor of the casino, ordering him to pay the $75,000 he owed to the casino. Vance appealed the ruling and has now lost again at the Indiana Court of Appeals. He still has the option of appealing that ruling to the Indiana Supreme Court.

Vance was unable to testify in either court because he suffered a stroke in 2005. According to the appeals court, his attorney, Larry Wilder, was unable to provide evidence that Vance was intoxicated. Video surveillance footage from the casino proved inconclusive, according to the court. The appeals court rule that the circuit court’s ruling was correct.

This is one of many cases in which players who lost a lot of money at the casino have tried to abandon that responsibility and put the fault on the casino instead. In most cases, it involved the player being allegedly intoxicated. Usually the court has ruled in favor of the casino, saying that it is the player’s responsibility to not take out a loan for money they can’t repay.

Established in 2003, eCOGRA is a UK-based regulatory agency tasked with ensuring their member websites are safe for players. eCOGRA provides tests of the games and security software, inspects records to ensure compliance to expected payout rates, and more. They also have a respected dispute mediation department that resolves issues raised by players who could not have the issue solved on their own.

eCOGRA acts as both regulator and mediator, ensuring that all online casinos and poker rooms with their “Safe & Fair” seal of approval are just that. In addition to that, they have been at the forefront of problem gambling awareness and responsible gambling training. Several years ago, the company began holding their training courses at a single location, where anyone attending learned about problem gambling awareness (such as warning signs), social responsibility, regulations, how to interact with the players, and how to deal with players who have a gambling problem.

Prior to this year, though, because they only conducted the training in their London office, there wasn’t a lot of attendance. Software companies and online casinos would send a few delegates, who would undergo the training and then go back to their company and train the rest of the employees. Last year, for the first time, eCOGRA took the training to them.

Tex Reese, Fair Gaming Advocate for eGOCRA, said that bringing the training to the operators is a “far more cost-effective way to reach more employees directly and properly train those who are on the front line and are most likely to initially deal with problem gamblers.”

Last year, eCOGRA visited eight international casino operators and software providers. During the day-long sessions, a total of 268 employees were trained.

Trolaro used to work as a insurance broker for Prudential Insurance Company of America. Aside from his day job, he enjoys playing games at online casinos, but figured he would enjoy them a lot more if he could somehow spend someone else’s money instead of his own. The genius then decided to defraud nine of his clients, stealing approximately $1.9 million, and use that money at the online casinos.

A New Jersey grand jury indicted Trolaro on one count of first-degree financial facilitation of criminal activity – in this case, money laundering, eight counts of second-degree theft by failure to make required disposition of property, and two counts of third-degree theft by failure to make required disposition of property.

According to the indictment, Trolaro bilked nine of his clients out of sums ranging from $46,000 to $910,000 from June 2008 until February of this year. At that time, an internal investigation by Prudential uncovered his wrongdoing and Trolaro was fired. Prudential then referred the matter to state authorities. According to a Prudential spokesman, Trolaro “misappropriated multiple clients’ funds withdrawn from their checking accounts, savings accounts, annuity contracts and/or brokerage accounts for his own benefit and borrowed money from several clients without firm approval.”

The good news is that I haven’t heard anyone use the “gambling addiction” excuse yet. “Oh, he has a gambling problem. That’s why he had to steal from his clients!” Though there are people with gambling problems, more often than not it’s simply a convenient excuse. In this case, like in many, greed, stupidity and selfishness seemed to be the largest factors at play – not gambling addiction.

Okay, or I guess that could be a coincidence. It gets worse, though. Here is an actual quote from the website: “The southeastern country is currently facing major financial problems, which could be solved by playing at online casinos.”

Really? So Greece is in the middle of a financial meltdown due to irresponsible spending and the solution is to gamble? That seems a little odd. Unemployment in Greece is ridiculous, though that is partly because so many people there would rather not work and simply make money off of government assistance programs. Recent austerity measures imposed by the EU, however, have led to rioting in the streets by communists, unions and other radicals. And while those people are burning cars, throwing rocks at police and marching on government lawns, your friends at onlinegamblingpal.com want you to think that the solution, if you’re Greek, is to take all of your money and spend it at an online casino in the hopes of doubling your cash or better.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that’s a bad strategy. In fact, it is the exact opposite of what I propose almost every day on this website: Never spend money that you can’t afford to lose. If you are hurting for money and need a quick buck, the casino is not an answer, because it is more likely to take your money than give you some.

Of course I support online gambling and I think it can be a very enjoyable activity if done responsibly. The key is the word “responsibly.” There are some websites out there – and onlinegamblingpal.com seems to be one of them – who don’t care about that and just want to encourage you to spend, spend spend. I’m not like them. If you don’t have enough money right now then go to your favorite online casino and play the free games. You can play the same games for free using fake money. Just keep your credit card in your wallet and enjoy the fun games. Hopefully soon you’ll be in a better financial situation and can go back to playing real-money games.

Stone, a resident of Portland, Oregon, took control of his mother’s finances in 2006 after she was diagnosed with dementia and moved to an assisted living home. Nothing is unusual about that. Anyone diagnosed with dementia usually either gives up control of their finances completely or has to have a designated family member co-sign any financial transaction. What is abnormal, or at least I hope, it what happened next.

According to the district attorney, Stone decided to use his mother’s finances for something much more fun and interesting than paying her medical bills. He took them to casinos and gambled with it instead. With no one there to pay for her thousands of dollars in medical bills, the state of Oregon picked up the tab. That means if you are reading this and live in Oregon, you paid for the medical bills of this man’s mother so he could have some fun at a casino.

Yup, that’s right, and it gets worse. According to the DA, Stone sold his mother’s home and received a check for more than $120,000. Somehow, though, it slipped his mind to report that sale. You see, if the state knew about it, they would have said something along the line of “Hey, it looks like you can afford to pay her bills instead of the taxpayers.” But he didn’t report the sale because that meant more gambling money. Woo hoo!

Stone pleaded not guilty yesterday to the charges and will appear in court next week. Of course we here at Gambling Review view the scumbag as innocent until proven guilty. That’s why I used words like “allegedly,” because I would hate to slander the cretin.

There are a number of points to make here, such as not gambling with someone else’s money, not gambling with money you can’t afford to lose, not committing crimes and whatnot, but I think all of that goes without saying. Instead, I will just say this:

If I remember to (which is a big if), I will give out both a Man of the Year (or Woman) and a Son of the Year (or Daughter) at the end of 2010. You can bet that Richard Stone is currently in consideration for both awards.

Obviously, saying something like that would be terrible for the economy and is the exact opposite of what the country needs. It’s also a loose paraphrase of the words of President Barack Obama. Throughout his year in the White House and even before, Obama has made it clear that he’s not a fan of capitalism, taking every opportunity to portray businesses as greedy, people as being in need of handouts, and the government being responsible for taking care of the people. That would be fine, except that he is the president of a country that has a Representative Republic system of government and a capitalist form of economy. His attitudes are not only counterproductive, but also downright dangerous for both.

The most recent of many examples of this is Obama’s criticism of Las Vegas and people who visit the city. Obama recently said that people saving money for college shouldn’t waste their money on gambling in Vegas. Last February, he made a similar remark about companies that received TARP funds, saying that it was irresponsible for them to take trips to the Sin City.

It’s no surprise that an anti-capitalist wouldn’t realize that trips to conferences and junkets in places like Las Vegas are an important part of the process of obtaining and retaining clients. But at least in that case he was criticizing the spending of money by companies that had received money from taxpayers. In his recent comments, he criticized private citizens for spending their own money.

Lawmakers and businessmen in Vegas are understandably furious and many have vowed to support whoever runs against Obama in 2012. They recognize that his comments and policies are bad for Las Vegas, the state of Nevada, and the country as a whole.

While the entire country has a dismal unemployment rate of 10% — you know, the catastrophic number that Obama said we would reach if he didn’t get to pass his “stimulus” bill – Nevada is even worse, at 13%. You should also note that both are conservative estimates that don’t count people with part-time jobs, those who have given up looking for work, and those who work on a temporary project. And with unemployment that bad and Nevada’s tourism industry struggling, the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the country (with the exception of George Soros and Al Gore), is telling people not to visit Las Vegas and not to spend money in their casinos, which just so happens to be the biggest industry they have in the state. Real responsible, Mr. President.

People of the United States and the rest of the world, spend your money as you see fit. You should of course be responsible, but if you have the disposable income to take a vacation, I can think of no place better than Vegas. Of course, as I’ve said countless times, you should never wager money that you can’t afford to lose, but if you can afford to lose it, Las Vegas would be happy to have it.

The Gilbert Arenas story has once again linked gambling with professional athletes. Many teams, in response, have banned their players from gambling. Instead, it seems like they shouldn’t hire athletes that they can’t trust to play a friendly game and not end up pointing guns at each other (if that even happened). The reports of what happened keep changing, with the most recent version I heard being that it was all a misunderstanding and that they were joking around about shooting each other over a gambling debt. Maybe teams shouldn’t hire athletes who don’t know that you shouldn’t joke about gun violence while wielding loaded guns. Just thinking out loud here…

There are people out there that are going to blame the situation, which resulted in the indefinite suspension of the superstar guard, on gambling. They will say that if you don’t let the players gamble, these things won’t happen. These are the same people who think whenever someone is shot and killed it is the fault of the gun instead of the shooter. Both arguments have the same problem (well, then anti-gun argument has a lot of problems): It ignores individual responsibility.

We at Gambling Review have always said that people need to gamble responsibly. That means to never bet money you can’t afford to lose, never bet money that would lead to you owing someone, always pay off your bets (to avoid gambling debt), and treat it like a fun game. If you’re not having fun, to the point where you feel like bringing guns into the mix, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Banning athletes from gambling won’t keep them out of trouble, unless you also ban them from drinking, driving, going to strip clubs, going to dance clubs, bachelor parties, and whatever else they like to do for fun.

The point is this: Professional athletes need to be responsible, just like everybody else. Some say they are wrong to throw their money away by gambling it rather than donating it to a charity. Maybe. If so, though, isn’t spending money on anything nonessential irresponsible? Is it irresponsible to buy a big high-definition TV? You don’t need TV at all and even if you want to watch television, there are cheaper sets out there. What about a new car? There are plenty of clunkers out there that you could buy for less (except those destroyed by the government). Why waste money on a house when there are plenty of cheap trailers out there? Why go to Disney World when you can have fun skipping stones across a pond?

Yes, I know that there is a line out there where wasting money is wrong. Why should Michael Jordan bet $1 million on a golf hole while impoverished children in the Chicago slums can’t afford to wear his Nike sneakers? Be that as it may, a person has a right to use their money as they choose. If you want to satisfy both urges, the urge to gamble and the urge to help people, there are lots of charity gambling tournaments out there. I think hitting those is a great idea for millionaire athletes with plenty of money to spend.