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Posts Tagged ‘Internet gambling’

For operators of on the web casinos close to the earth, the issue of permitting consumers and taking bets from the United States has often been a tough issues. Even though there has been some liberalization of gambling laws in America since the 1960s and up via nowadays, the federal government still holds the position that all on the web playing is illegal and operators of casinos that take bets from Americans on the web are at threat of being shut down. One illustrative example is that of BetonSports, a Costa Rican business that was shut down by the feds in 2006.

BetonSports was so successful that it was able to float a $100 million IPO (Initial Public Offering) and get listed on the UK’s London Stock Exchange. The company was licensed by Costa Rica and had plans to expand its operations additional into Central and South American countries . Unfortunately , the corporate also took bets from the US and its CEO David Carruthers was a public advocate for further liberalization of gambling laws from the US and worldwide, in particular for on-line games .

The American government was quick to take action towards the corporate and its directors with an indictment versus the each the founder and also the CEO. The indictment included costs of cash laundering and tax evasion, which put both of them at danger of being extradited to the US. Though on-line playing and taking bets from Americans may perhaps not be illegal in some countries and would not lead to extradition, money laundering is constantly illegal, so this place the founder and CEO at greater risk .

CEO Carruthers was arrested in Dallas while waiting to change planes and the corporate was issued a restraining order towards the corporate which prohibited it from taking bets from Americans. In addition, press releases were sent out that implied connections between BetonSports and also the mafia, making the story even much more sensational that it already was. The negative publicity helped to bring the company down, leading to layoffs of most of its staff.

The company stopped its operations in 2006 with the arrest of the CEO, along with the case had been pending for trial for various years. The authorities has utilized the case to show that it has the laws and lawyers already to take on world-wide-web gambling , especially sports betting. Finally in early 2010, Carruthers was sentenced to 33 months in jail after pleading guilty to costs of conspiracy and racketeering. A news story by Reuters in January claimed that he was the initial of the defendants to plead guilty and would be willing to testify in opposition to other co-defendants.

The BetonSports indictment and shutdown happened just because the story of Antigua’s complaint versus the US for not permitting web casinos into the States began to escalate. The WTO began to come close to to Antigua’s position versus the US in terms of forcing America to open its trade to foreign on the web playing operations, just as the US was going right after other online casinos around the globe . The irony ought to not be lost, but this also shows that America will desperately cling to its protectionist online gaming policies even inside face of WTO and worldwide opposition to its anti-gambling legal guidelines.

Michael writes articles discussing current trends within the on the web gaming planet , which include video games , social networking applications, and on the web casino operations. He also provides information on several upcoming sports events, which includes odds and picks for diverse NFL, NBA, and UFC match-ups. You’ll be able to visit his site to read a lot more about who he predicts will win the upcoming NFL games or Super Bowl, and while you are there, you may even be inspired to place a football bet or begin betting on the web yourself . You’ll be able to come across his web page on the web here: http://www.ibetsonline.com/

You may not be sure if you should try playing at an online casino, or if you should simply save your money and not risk it. Undoubtedly, you’ve heard all sorts of stories about online security, or the lack thereof. Department stores get their databases hacked into and all customer credit card information stolen, or money gets diverted as financial transactions are made. So why on earth would you want to go to an online gambling casino when it would be such a prime target for this type of crime?

Getting advice from casino experts is one way you might avoid a dishonest online casino and discover sites you feel you can trust. In fact, a website like www.onlinecasinosite.com is recommended by many experts because its people have spent the past decade visiting, playing at, and evaluating internet casinos. Some of their evaluation criteria include secure payouts, fairness of their software, and customer service.

Remember also that for an online poker site to make money in the long term, they can’t cheat their customers. Unless their gaming programs are on the up and up, not only won’t they get repeat business, but their bad reputation will make their initial business dry up too. Of course, that still doesn’t protect you from fake casino sites set up just so crooks can collect your credit card info. But again this can be prevented by reading the experts’ websites to learn about the best internet casinos. As well, if you play at sites affiliated with poker pros, such as www.fulltiltpoker.com and www.pokerstars.net, then you can be confident they are on the up-and-up.

Never forget that every casino’s games are slanted so that the house wins most of the time. This applies to an online casino as much as to one in the real world; a fact understood by casinos and players alike. But that’s quite different from some offshore gambling site refusing to pay your winnings or skewing game programs so you never win at all. You can avoid the few fraudulent sites out there, though, if you pay attention to the experts and follow their lead to the casino sites that really are trustworthy.

Beth Kaminski is the co-author of Curing Your Anxiety And Panic Attacks which detailed treating panic disorder as well as tips on the various anxiety disorder medications available at www.anxietydisordercure.com.

Yes, the internet is a great spreader of knowledge, a great source of news, and all of that. But another thing it allows is gambling online. Even if people like to gain knowledge, they also enjoy having a good time, and the web has made it very easy for people to place a bet from time to time or play a little poker. As the internet has grown in popularity and scope, internet gambling has grown right along with it.

The different methods of online gambling have multiplied in a big hurry. One of the biggest industries involves betting on sports of all kinds. For example, there are websites that allow people to bet on horse races, or even those that concentrate still more narrowly on one type of race, like harness racing. There are other sites that are equally specialized, like NBA or NFL betting sites, or those that follow the big European soccer leagues. But many websites cover as many sports as they can, so you might click on one tab for basketball, another for soccer, and others for tennis, golf, football and so on.

Other types of websites that allow gambling online include things like online casinos and websites entirely devoted to poker, which have recently become wildly popular. Online bingo provides another type of online gambling. It may be a small industry compared to others, but it has a devoted following. And now some mobile devices, like iPhones, computer tablets or other wireless mobile tools, have applications that allow users to access and play games in internet casinos too.

There are all sorts of questions about the legality of gambling online, questions that lawmakers are just beginning to deal with. Some states have made the practice outright illegal, while the federal government has tried to create online casino laws that would prevent banks from sending or receiving money from these casinos and other sites. But there is some backtracking on that, with the government thinking it would be better to regulate this phenomenon rather than try to eliminate it. Those in-the-know realize that online gambling has an enthusiastic following of millions of people, and is pretty much here to stay.

Beth Kaminski is the co-author of Curing Your Anxiety And Panic Attacks which detailed treating panic disorder as well as tips on the various anxiety disorder medications available at www.anxietydisordercure.com.

Online casinos may appeal to certain types of people and not to others, or they may be an enjoyable supplement to a real-life casino experience. For some people, there simply can’t be any substitute for “the real thing,” because they enjoy the sense of occasion and the atmosphere just as much as the actual games they play. And they may feel that playing these same games online just wouldn’t be the same, lacking the life and the atmosphere of a real-life casino.

But people have many reasons for visiting casinos, and that includes those who frequent online casinos just as much as those who make a planned trip to Vegas. The ones looking for atmosphere and the sense of occasion are unlikely to stop taking their annual trips to Atlantic City. But for people who can’t make it there, or who look for excitement from the games more than the surrounding atmosphere, an online gambling casino provides that for them. And such sites do try to create atmosphere, in the dark background of their pages and the increasingly realistic images they use. But it’s the games themselves that are most important.

If you’re not worried about trusting the programs that run the games, then playing them at online casinos can be a similar experience to what you’d have at a real casino, even if the two are not identical. Random number generators in the programming code give the same odds you would have in, say, a craps game or at a slot machine. Online gaming may not involve personal interaction with other players, and there are certainly no free drinks, but the games often move more quickly than in real life. So there are some tradeoffs and some gains.

Some may question whether online casinos can really be trusted, though, and wonder whether the games might be programmed in advance to be fraudulent. But of course, even casino games in the bricks-and-mortar version of casinos are programmed in various ways to favor the house over the players. And any casino website that runs fraudulent games or balks at payouts would lose their paying customers pretty quickly. People looking for the excitement of the games, with a touch of the graphic atmosphere of a genuine casino, can find reliable websites with enjoyable games just by shopping around for a while.

Beth Kaminski is the co-author of Curing Your Anxiety And Panic Attacks which detailed treating panic disorder as well as tips on the various anxiety disorder medications available at www.anxietydisordercure.com.

Betting online is a quickly rising phenomenon, drawn from people’s real-world gambling interests and spurred by the phenomenal growth of the internet. And as this new avenue for gambling has taken hold and become popular, it’s left governments racing to catch up. While the existing laws were barely adequate to handle gambling as it was practiced in the latter half of the twentieth century, the growth of internet gambling in the new century has forced governments to find new methods of regulation.

In 2006, Congress passed a law that was meant to ban the means people used for placing online bets. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act effectively forbids American banks to transfer funds to or from any online gambling site. This meant Americans theoretically couldn’t place bets, even on websites registered in other countries and entirely legal there. American government protectionism has even gone so far as to prompt the arrest of executives of any company taking American money, if they set foot on American soil. Once this law passed, all gambling sites publicly listed on stock exchanges stopped taking bets from American customers. However, most privately-owned sites still allowed Americans to place bets.

The part of the law dealing with betting online was actually tacked onto a larger law dealing with security at all American ports, a rather late response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It was written by a Republican congressman and rushed through, shepherded mainly by Republican leaders of both Congress and the Senate. But what made this online casino law interesting was that it exempted forms of existing online gambling that the government was already profiting hugely from, like state lotteries and horse racing.

Eventually, a reprieve on the implementation of this law against betting online was granted, and its enforcement is currently set to go into effect in December. But Congressman Barney Frank is spearheading the introduction of online casino laws designed not to ban online betting, but regulate it instead. Many speculate that part of the impetus for this delay and potential revamping is that Americans spent at least eight billion dollars on online gambling in 2009. Given that the government already receives a great deal of revenue from existing gambling, it’s not surprising that legislators, when it comes right down to it, couldn’t possibly ban a new and colossal source of revenue.

Beth Kaminski is the co-author of Curing Your Anxiety And Panic Attacks which detailed treating panic disorder as well as tips on the various anxiety disorder medications available at www.anxietydisordercure.com.

It sounds simple enough if you want to place a bet with an offshore sportsbook on some international event, perhaps a World Cup soccer game or hockey tournament. But when you try to place your online bets you discover that the website can’t take them, because your government won’t allow your bank to transfer funds to or from the gambling site. You might even live in one of the few states that has made personal betting illegal. Yet gambling experts scoff and say you’re fine, and show you some workarounds. Will you get into trouble or not? Who can tell you what will happen and where you really stand?

What will happen if someone places an online bet? According to the www.vegasclick.com site, nothing will happen. No individual has ever been prosecuted for doing so. Even the 2006 law was aimed at banks, not individual bettors. So if a person finds a way to get their funds to their favorite offshore betting site, they can carry on. Michael Bluejay, writing at the site in 2007 following passage of the law, said Americans are going to continue online gambling and nobody is likely to stop them, law or not.

The www.gambling-law-us.com website has a more sober outlook on this law against funding offshore betting sites. Everyone from American banks to the most humble employee of one of these online casino sites could potentially be prosecuted, even if they are citizens of another country and what they’re doing is perfectly legal there. This kind of extreme law is considered by some offshore sites to be too much hassle to deal with, and most eventually adopted a policy of no longer accepting online bets from American citizens.

Will things stay this way? For many gamblers, placing online bets merely got more complicated, but is by no means impossible. It’s not hard to set up workarounds, and according to some sources, Americans accomplished almost eight billion dollars worth of workarounds in 2009 alone. For this and many other reasons, a total ban against participating in casino games at offshore sites may end up being as effective as a ban against drugs. In other words, not very. This is why some American legislators are now attempting to revamp the law, not to ban online gambling, but to regulate and tax it instead.

Beth Kaminski is the co-author of Curing Your Anxiety And Panic Attacks which detailed treating panic disorder as well as tips on the various anxiety disorder medications available at www.anxietydisordercure.com.

If you believe what Celebrity Apprentice Joan Rivers says, poker players are “beyond white trash.” But I think there are millions of people who would beg to differ. In fact, poker is wildly popular right now and so are those who play it professionally. This is evidenced by the fact that professional poker stars such as Johnny Chan, Mike Matusow, Phil Gordon and many others have become famous beyond anyone’s expectations in recent years.

Poker’s star-making ability has inspired many to try to make a living on online poker sites. Some have actually been very successful and because of this many more people have become Internet poker millionaires. These successful poker players are sometimes surprising, because they’re often quite young and not seasoned pros. But for every group of successful poker players, there are also those who have been victims of online gambling scams. Mostly new players step into this trap, because they don’t know how to verify a gambling site’s bona fides.

To make sure you don’t fall into this same trap, the following tips can help you assess whether a site has the potential to be a scam:

• If the site doesn’t have professional-looking graphics and technology, play somewhere else. Low-quality construction could be the sign of a quick-buck artist at work or at the very least, a cash-strapped operator.
• Check if the site or its owners are members of the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC). IGC members pledge to follow a code of ethics.
• Don’t register with a site that doesn’t have 24-hour support with both a toll-free phone number and e-mail addresses.
• If a site passes the first three requirements, do several small test transactions before you do any major gambling. These should tell you a lot about the workings of the site.

Everyone has to start somewhere, so there’s no reason why with a little luck and a lot of practice you couldn’t become one of online poker’s stars. Just be sure to do your due diligence first, so any success you achieve won’t be spoiled by regret.

When playing on Internet poker sites, you need to be aware of a lot more than just poker tips. Unfortunately, there are an abundance of people out there who would be more than happy to fleece you while you gamble. Even seasoned competitors occasionally get taken on online gaming sites. This is a great example: in 2009, the news program 60 Minutes covered a hacking that happened on a prominent on-line poker site. The breach came from an ex-employee who knew the site thoroughly, and a lot of big-time players were ripped-off. That was a unusual case, though, because the site operator had no notion what was going on. In that case, even people who are diligent and careful wouldn’t have been able to discern the scenario.

Thankfully, not all on-line gaming threats are that hidden. There are some tell-tale indications that let savvy players know they should stay away. That’s why you should go onto any Internet gambling site armed with the following Internet gambling precautions:

Check whether the gaming site is an industry leader
The first thing you should do is to check if the site belongs to the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC). IGC members pledge to follow a code of ethics, so there’s at least a fighting chance that they will be upstanding.

See what kind of assets  have been put into the site
If the site’s graphics and technology aren’t up-to-snuff and seem unprofessional, go somewhere else. Shoddy design could indicate that a quick-buck artist or cash-strapped proprietor run the site. If so, they may go belly-up and take your money with them.

Make sure the site offers appropriate customer service
Make sure the site has 24×7 support with a toll-free phone number and a dedicated support e-mail address. It’s a good idea to contact support before you register, to see how long it takes to respond and how well they answer a test inquiry.

Test the waters
If the site looks up to snuff, is an IGC member and has verifiable contact information, conduct a few small transactions as tests before you surrender any significant money.

Taking the steps above should point out a lot about the workings of the site, so do yourself a favor and pay heed to each one. They could make a big difference for you. Remember, there are a lot of on-line gaming sites, so don’t be afraid to take your gaming dollars elsewhere if a site can’t clear any of these steps.

If you believe what Celebrity Apprentice Joan Rivers says, poker players are “beyond white trash.” But I think there are millions of people who would beg to differ. In fact, poker is incredibly popular at the moment and so are those who play it professionally. This is evidenced by the fact that professional poker players such as Annie Duke, Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, Phil Gordon and many others have achieved enormous celebrity status in the last decade.

This surge in popularity has caused many to try their hand, so to speak, at making a living playing on online poker websites. Some have actually been very successful and as a result, poker has created a whole new wave of Internet millionaires. These successful poker players are sometimes surprising, because they’re often very young and not seasoned pros. But for every group of successful poker players, there are also plenty of people who are victims of online poker scams. Mostly new players fall into this trap, because they don’t know how to verify a online poker site’s bona fides.

To make sure you don’t fall into this same trap, the following points can help you determine whether a site is a scam:

• If the site doesn’t have professional-looking graphics and technology, play somewhere else. Sub-standard construction could be an indicator of the work of a quick-buck artist or a cash-strapped owner who may go belly-up and take your winnings with him.
• Check if the site or its owners are members of the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC). IGC members pledge to follow a code of ethics.
• Make sure the site has 24-hour support with a toll-free phone number and e-mail.
• If the site looks professional, is an IGC member and has good contact info, do several small transactions as tests before you put up any major money. These should tell you a lot about the workings of the site.

Everyone has to start somewhere, so there’s no reason why with a little luck and a lot of practice you couldn’t become one of online poker’s stars. Just make sure to do your homework first, so your success won’t be tainted by regret.