17 Online Gambling

The rise in popularity of online casinos has been too big an opportunity for criminals not to exploit, ranging from fake casino sites to fake poker players. Fake online casinos will not only have odds that are more stacked against you than normal, but you’ve also just given them your credit card details.  You may even win in some of the games, but in the long term they will take your money. You may never even realise that the casino was not playing by the rules and due to generous introduction deals; you may get all your friends involved. If you plan to gamble online, be weary of the adverts and emails offering large sums of money as an introductory offer, where you must stake a certain amount of money to get the offer. Even the legitimate ones have clauses so that anything you win with their FREE money cannot be withdrawn for 90 days, by which time you’ve probably gambled it all away in other games.

More worrying is the number of fake poker players in legitimate online casinos. Here stolen credit card information is used to create accounts for ‘virtual robot’ players in live card games who can share information between themselves. This gives the criminals a subtle way of stealing from the online casinos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, the 8-person live card game could be made of 3 virtual players, who know each other’s cards, greatly reducing the odds for the other 5 people winning much if anything at all. The major online casinos now have to invest in sophisticated monitoring systems to deal with this problem, but like antivirus, the criminals are often one step ahead.

Fake casino sites or introduction adverts can even be linked to real casinos and may try to get you install their ‘software’ first before passing you on the real casino site. This way they get to install whatever malware they want and get to monitor your activities, sharing any card game information with their own ‘players’ and you are none the wiser.

Also, if you ever try to sign up for an online casino for the first time and you are told that a user with your email address already exists or that your credit card is linked to another account, you probably have had your details cloned. Best to cancel your credit cards and get new ones issued, and also stop any online banking or shopping until you’ve scanned your machine for viruses with a 3rd party online scanner.

Because a lot of online gambling websites are accessed late at night, most people are already tired, something the online casinos use to their advantage. Unfortunately, this can also be used to the criminals’ advantage too.

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