Casino News: Online Betting is Still a Craze

According to the report of IDG News Service, despite the imposition of law prohibiting financial institutions in USA from processing payment transaction to online gambling sites, U.S. employees are frequent visitors to several sports betting websites. ScanSafe, the cyber security vendor is the source of this report.

According to the IDG report, employees of ScanSafe attempted visits to various sports gambling websites & a decent 77% U.S. customers were present from January 23 and 31. This Sunday will experience the final NFL championship game, Super Bowl.

ScanSafe introduces a service to block websites of large-scale companies. Around 6 billion web requests are made per month as examined by them.

US President George Bush signed into a law of prohibiting US financial institutions from processing payments transaction to gambling web sites as a protective measure in October 2006. Government will develop processing regulations for US financial institutions by July 2007.

Various gambling websites have made announcement to U.S. customers that financial institutions are not in the market. It was reported that PokerRoom.com, a popular website asked its U.S. customers to cash out on Wednesday.

There was a message on the home page of this website telling “"The remaining companies that process cashouts from PokerRoom.com to our players in the United States have contacted us to say that in the near future they will no longer facilitate these transactions. As such, we would advise all American players who have not cashed out already to do so immediately."

The gambling provision, amended by Congress onto a ports security bill in late September, Dan Nadir, VP for product strategy at ScanSafe commented that the gambling provision had no impact on the number of people frequent to online gambling websites. This provision was amended in September. The Vice President also said that his company was not tracking the results of this betting.

Nadir stated,” We suspected [the law] wouldn't have much of an impact". These websites will be developing substitute mechanisms for payment.

ScanSafe didn't clue the exact quantum of visits to online gambling sites past week, But, it was observed that 3.4 percent of the content was represented, blocked in 2006. It was calculated that 15.1 percent was Chat or instant messaging, 14.6 percent was advertising, 7.2 percent was Web mail, and 3.9 percent was pornography of the blocked contents.

Bodog.com & other similar betting websites experienced frequent visitors last week, Nadir said. ScanSafe observed that people were more frequent to sports betting sites rather than its casino or lottery counterparts. Approximately 53% US visitors cruised to these sports betting websites. There was no instant response from Bodog.com while an email was sent to it, asking about its present business situation.

The companies blocked employee access to gambling sites up to 84%. There are some valid reasons behind accoding to the vice President. Companies are not keeping faith on the security status of these online gambling websites and they are not interested to allow their employees playing online games at the working hours.