Web Crime: Online Gambling
This is the first in a series of blogs which focuses on crime in the internet and what companies are doing (or not) to try and stop it. What brought this up? Well several things. First was a research request that came in requesting background information on cyberwarfare. Who knew something like that existed? Then a friend of mine had one of her social network sites hacked into. How safe are social networks really? Finally, a report this weekend by 60 Minutes on fraud in the online gambling industry prompted me to write this series.
The 60 Minutes report entitled How Online Gamblers Unmasked Cheaters tells the story of how online poker players uncovered the fact that someone was cheating. It turned out that one of the employees of an online gambling website was able to see everyone’s cards and cashed in on millions of dollars. What makes prosecuting especially difficult is that any online business generally works out of multiple locations in terms of the servers being housed perhaps in Europe, the programmers in Asia and the management in the United States. The article, on which the 60 Minutes report is based, in the Washington Post entitled Players Gamble on Honesty, Security of Internet Betting, estimates the online gambling industry to be worth about $18 billion a portion of that $4 billion is brought in by online poker alone.
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Posted, in Legal,Technology, by Helen Losch on December 2, 2008 | Permalink
