Today the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that a lawsuit asking NBC (NYSE:GE) to pay back money spent on sending text messages in hopes of winning a big pay out from the "Deal or No Deal" Lucky Case Game, didn't violate state anti-gambling laws, and had it thrown out.
What the game did was ask viewers to guess which of the final six briefcases contained the money. The ones who guessed correctly would win the usual top prize of $10,000.
The lawyer for Michael and Michele Hardin tried to say the game was an illegal gambling operation and that Georgia state law were allowed to retrieve the money based on the law saying all gambling contracts were void.
In the ruling today the court determined that text messages couldn't be considered a wager or a bet. They also said there is no state law that offers people a way of recovering their money.
A very old Georgia law allows those who lose money in an illegal gambling scheme to recover their losses.
From NBC's view, they said it was a tool used for marketing, not a lottery, which the court agreed with.
The "Lucky Case Game" was dropped by NBC once the lawsuit was filed, and is on a "short break," according to the Web site.
This sounds like people out of control, and trying to game the system by using an extraordinary amount of text messages to win the money. It wasn't revealed how much the couple spent, but it must have been fairly significant to generate the lawsuit.
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