Couple launches class-action lawsuit over problem gambling

Couple launches class-action lawsuit over problem gambling

Markham

By: Joe Fantauzzi

A Markham couple has filed a $3.5 billion class-action lawsuit against the province’s gaming agency on behalf of gamblers who say they asked to be forbidden from casinos but were still allowed inside.

The information is contained in a statement of claim, filed by Peter Dennis, 49, and his wife, Zubin Noble, 61, on Monday.

None of the claims has been proven in court. The statement claims that Mr. Dennis and each of the class action members were “compulsive gamblers” and that problem gambling “disrupts, compromises and ultimately destroys the lives of individual problem gamblers by causing a range of harms for them and their family members including emotional, social, financial, legal, employment, educational and health-related harms.”

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. failed to take reasonable steps to implement its voluntary self-exclusion policy by relying on memory-based enforcement and failing to “implement reasonable measures other that memory-based enforcement to deny self-excluded customers entry to its gambling venues including, but not limited to, ‘carding’ using photo-identification and other approaches and technologies available to the OLGC”, some of which were being used to identify and monitor under age people and cheaters, the statement of claim reads.

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