Court finds one-cent auction does not violate lottery legislation

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Satakunta District Court ruled on Tuesday that two 28-year-old men were not in violation of the law on lotteries with their one cent auction website.
      The court nevertheless fined the men for unauthorised sale of lottery tickets of the state-run lottery and sports betting operator Veikkaus.
      The case has the nature of a legal precedent, as a trial in a similar case is scheduled to be heard in court in Oulu in late April.
     
In a typical one-cent auction, each bid, submitted by SMS message, raises the price of the product being sold by one cent.
      If no further bids are forthcoming within a set period of time, such as five minutes, the last bidder gets the product at the price that it was going for at the time.
      The final sale price often remains low, but winning such an auction can prove expensive, as the text messages for the bids are priced at between 50 cents and two euros.
     
The court found that while an individual bidder cannot know for sure if he or she will get the desired product, the activity does not meet the definition of a lottery.
      Jouni Laiho, head of lottery matters at the Finnish Police Administration, continues to disagree, noting that the use of text messages makes the one-cent lottery effectively a game of chance.
      “Nobody can know when a text message is sent, and when it is received into the incremental system. To that extent, the service is pure chance”, notes Laiho, who first filed the complaint about the service.
     
After last week’s trial, the Kakusuu.com website announced a merger of its activities with the service of Sunnycent.com, whose auction site is maintained by the Estonia-based company Tallinn Lux.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Interior Ministry asks police to look into legality of Internet cent auction operation (9.4.2008)

Helsingin Sanomat