I don’t know where you get the number 1200, but clearly that number is incorrect. There certainly are not 1200 casino affiliate programs out there to choose from. There are perhaps 200, and of those 200, maybe 50 of them are decent, above board, profitable programs.
Actually, it is the vendors’ responsibility, and many of them do take swift action when something is brought to their attention.
Many programs do have clauses in their T&Cs that prohibit spamming, scraping, and other unethical activities. These programs know that they will make more money in the long run by partnering with ethical, non-blackhat webmasters. When there is an issue, they deal with it by forcing the rogue affiliate to fix the problem, or they just suspend the account.
If the blackhatter wants to point his traffic somewhere else, he can. Eventually, however, he will run out of profitable options. Surely it isn’t profitable to promote (1) a shady program that may or may not pay its affiliates, or (2) a program whose casinos are so widely blacklisted, even your own grandmother has heard about it.
Regarding the act of scraping snippets of information from websites — this is not acceptable behavior. It is unethical to use someone else’s work to make a profit for yourself. If you rank above my site for a unique phrase that I created, then you are essentially stealing traffic from me. And no, I am not talking about a generic phrase like “online casino” — I am talking about unique words such as “drawdead” or “captainsfreecasinos.”
The bottom line is this —
All of us here are competitors, but we all want to compete in an ethical work environment — i.e. without scraping, spamming, stealing, sabotaging, etc. We are an extremely strong-minded, willful group, and we bring in a lot of money to the most profitable casino affiliate programs.
We are going to support the programs that condemn unethical activities, and we are going to stop supporting programs that condone unethical activities. This is a simple numbers game. There are more white hats than black, and in time, the programs that condone blackhat tactics will go out of business. Or, if they are have any business sense at all, they will change their tune and clean things up before it is too late.
That is my “final solution and reality check.”