Online vs. Offline Gambling
I was reading today the FBI’s warning against online gambling for US citizens :
If you’ve ever thought about visiting a cyber casino, here’s something you should know: it’s illegal to gamble online in the United States.
“You can go to Vegas. You can go to Atlantic City. You can go to a racetrack. You can go to those places and gamble legally. But don’t do it online. It’s against the law,” says Leslie Bryant, head of our Cyber Crime Fraud unit at FBI Headquarters.
A couple of months ago I was talking to a fellow PCI auditor who worked most of his time in Middle East and he was telling me about the issues they have over there about online gambling. You see,currently there are no licensed casinos present in Bahrain, Iran, Saudi, Syria, UAE, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait and this fact pushed a lot of people into online gambling. The latest trend was to use PDA/Smartphone devices for online gambling.
I read now that US bans online gambling and I can’t help wondering : which of the two "models" inflicts a bigger risk of financial fraud / money laundry ? And since it’s illegal to operate an online casino business in US, where are the datacenters and all the servers that host zillions of online gambling websites ?
Looking at whois data for a couple of online casinos I see that they don’t give a damn on US regulations 
. Yes, most of them are hosted in US .
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June 11th, 2007 08:29
The US is full of either backwards far-right religious control freaks, who champion “personal responsibility” in choosing to wear a seatbelt to allegedly keep government smaller, but make sure its subjects can’t do very much that is against their religion ( I guess personal responsibility was thrown out the window ), or a bunch of corrupt state senators who want to proect their industry from the bad online companies who won’t benefit their taxes …
Whenever the US has a law simmilar to the Arab nations, something must be wrong.
June 11th, 2007 09:53
Not sure what you meant by the last sentence of that comment Bob, my post was just an ironic view of how relative “illegal gambling” is : parts of the world can’t do it online and are advised to go to a real casino, whilst parts of the world are not allowed to step foot in one and they find refuge in online gambling .
One thing is sure : gambling was a high rolling industry way before Internet was born and I guess it is here to stay either online or offline .