Casino-Magnates :

Stephen Alan Wynn (born January 27, 1942 in New Haven, Connecticut) is a casino resort developer. He is credited with spearheading the dramatic growth of Las Vegas, Nevada in the 1990s.

Wynn's father, who ran a string of bingo parlors in the eastern United States, died soon before Wynn graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. Wynn took over management the family's bingo operation in Maryland. He did well enough at it to gather the money to buy a small stake in the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where he and his wife, Elaine, moved in 1967.

Wynn managed to parlay his earnings from a land deal in the early 1970s (the deal involved two established titans of the Las Vegas casino business, Howard Hughes and Caesars Palace) into a controlling interest in a dusty downtown casino, the Golden Nugget Las Vegas. Wynn renovated, revamped and expanded the Golden Nugget with enormous success, in the method attracting a new upscale clientele to downtown Las Vegas.

His first major Strip casino, The Mirage, lay down a new standard for size and lavishness, with construction costs to match. Financed largely with junk bonds issued by Michael Milken, the Mirage featured an indoor forest and an outdoor "volcano," and with high class room appointments and an emphasis on service, the Mirage was another great success. Wynn expanded further on his idea of the luxury casino in the later Bellagio resort, including an artificial lake, indoor conservatory and an art gallery in which Wynn displayed museum-quality artworks, and branches of high-end boutiques and restaurants situated in Paris, San Francisco or New York.

Wynn's company, Mirage Resorts, Inc., also developed casino/hotels in other place around the United States.

Mirage Resorts was sold to MGM Grand Inc. in 2000, to form MGM Mirage. With the money he made on that deal, and with his talent to secure ever-greater financing, Wynn built a new resort, his largest yet, the Wynn Las Vegas, which opened on the former site of the Desert Inn on April 28, 2005.

According to the Forbes 400 record, Wynn became a billionaire in 2004, when his net worth doubled, to $1.3 billion.

Fraudulent online casino behavior

A fraudulent activity on the part of online casinos has been documented. The most generally reported behaviors are refusal to pay withdrawals or cheating software. An online casino with several confirmed cases of fraudulent behavior is often called a rogue casino by the online casino player community.

One commonly reported behavior related to refusal to pay withdrawals is the refusal to pay withdrawals on time. A rogue casino may intentionally delay a withdrawal in hopes that the player will carry on gambling with the money in the account and lose it all back.

Cheating software appears to be less common than payment problems.

Some casino software has been mathematically proven to cheat, such as Casino Bar (evidence by Michael Shackleford and others). Elka System/Oyster Gaming software is known to cheat, also established by Michael Shackleford. Screen shots from the back office of an older brand of software indicate the odds could be adjusted by the operator.

Much of the speculation about casino software cheating is generally the result of a player finding a pattern in a statistically small set of results. Most people in the online casino industry think that most of the major casino software brands offer odds and paybacks that are the same as their land-based casino counterparts.

Many casino gambling portals and player forums preserve blacklists of rogue casinos. These can simply found in any major search engine, but most of them constitute individual webmaster and player opinions rather than anything official from any type of regulating body.