"I won three thousand dollars two different times, and I've won other money too,” said a customer of Internet Café Sweepstakes Games who didn’t want her identity revealed.
Roanoke City police executed search warrants here and at another internet café on Orange Avenue Thursday night looking for evidence of illegal online gambling. The search warrant says an undercover investigator went to both locations several times, where he paid money, played casino games like keno, and won or lost money on different occasions.
"There are video poker, keno, and the rest of them are slot machine games,” said Paul Bennett, owner of the Williamson Road café. He says everything is legal and claims he's just selling time on the internet.
"We do have promotional sweepstakes going to try to increase sales of internet time,” said Bennett.
He says customers buy internet time and for every dollar they spend, they are given free entries into his "sweepstakes." While they use their internet time, one of the options on the computer is to play casino games.
Bennett says his business is a clever way to reveal sweepstakes winners.
"They think they lined up three lemons on the slot machine but that's not what you did. You pulled a ticket out of the prize pool and then the computer said well I've got to put out three lemons to show him he won his fifty dollars,” said Bennett.
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