The machines also vended pre-paid phone cards. Ohio law permits individual jurisdictions to adopt their own policies, but does not explicitly regulate sweepstakes games.

The state’s chief law-enforcement officer is working with legislators to design legislation for creating a fair, honest policy on sweepstakes video games that will comply with Ohio’s gambling law. Currently, skill-based amusement games are limited to non-cash prizes whose wholesale value is below $10. Last October, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld that maximum.

Meanwhile, in Pinellas County, Florida, near Tampa, the county sheriff sent cease-and-desist letters to four operators in May, cautioning that they are operating illegal Internet sweepstakes games. There is a question on the legitimacy of these claims, based on a prior court case in another county, where the operator beat the gambling charges.

Operators targeted by the county sheriff have dealt with the issue in diverse ways. They have either removed the games, or filed a court injunction against the sheriff, which a county judge then denied. The other two operators relocated their sweeps cafes to incorporated cities within Pinellas County, outside the sheriff’s authority.

In Miami-Dade County, where arcade raids have proven controversial since becoming a campaign issue in last fall’s mayoral race, two video-game arcades faced police raids in early June. The raids resulted from what law-makers called extensive undercover investigations. Thirty video games were seized by officers of the organised-crime division, who characterised the games as illegal slot machines.

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