Riverboat Casinos Sue Scientific Games Over Alleged Patent Fraud

Two riverboat casinos have filed a class action antitrust lawsuit against Scientific Games, accusing the company of using fraudulently obtained patents and sham lawsuits to maintain a monopoly on the automatic card shuffler market. The legal action has been brought by the operating companies behind Casino Queen, a riverboat casino located near the Mississippi River in East St. Louis, Illinois, and Casino Queen Marquette, a 17,514 square feet riverboat casino located in Marquette, Iowa.

The lawsuit centers around the estimated $100 million per year market for automatic casino card shufflers, with allegations that Scientific Games Corporation companies have “procured patents by fraud and then asserted those patents in sham lawsuits against competitors, which effectively excluded competitors from the market.”

One of these lawsuits, in 2018, saw a Chicago jury return a $315 million verdict against Scientific Games Corp, following a lawsuit they filed in 2012 alleging that would-be competitors, Shuffle Tech, was using its patented technology without authorization. The current legal action alleges “purposeful abuse of the patent program and the judicial approach,” with a “pattern of suing would-be competitors to enforce patents Defendant knew would not have issued had they not concealed the prior art from the [USPTO].”