In Spite Of The New United States Unlawful Gambling Act, Prior To The Super Bowl, United States Residents Are Still Visiting Online Gambling Sites

According to ScanSafe, cybersecurity vendor, the new United States government law that prohibits Americans from gambling online is not stopping employees of United States based companies from surfing  sports betting sites, the  IDG News Service reports.

Regardless of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, during the week January 23rd to 31st, attempts by employees of the companies being serviced by ScanSafe, to access sports betting sites were up 77 percent. This was reported by IDG to be linked with the playing of the National Football League’s Super Bowl championship game, which will take place this Sunday.

As a provider of services to large businesses, ScanSafe checks out over 6 billion Web requests a month by its customer’s employees.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act which was signed into law by President George Bush last October, give the government until the middle of July to define regulations for dealing with financial institutions that process payments to gambling sites.

But as a move to protect itself for possible criminal charges, various online gambling sites have already started to tell their U.S. customers that financial institutions are barred from working with United States customers and sites such as PokerRoom.com have told their U.S. customers to cash out.

The PokerRoom.com has placed a notice on its home page warning players that those companies that deal with cashouts from PokerRoom.com for United States players have contacted PokerRoom.com to inform them that in the very near future they will no longer be handling such transactions and wrong players from the United States to cash out their moneys immediately.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was made a part of a bill passed by the United States Congress dealing with ports security late September. ScanSafe vice president Dan Nadit has said that the bill has in now way affected the numbers of people that are visiting online gambling sites. He is ScanSafe’s VP for Product Strategy. The security service does not indicate whether or not bets are placed by these people.

ScanSafe VP Nadir said that the company had suspected that the new law would have little impact and that there are even sites that are developing new methods of payment to evade these regulations.

While not offering actual numbers, ScanSafe reports that during the past year gambling sites represented about 3.4 percent of those blocked for clients in 2006. For comparison purposes, 15.1 percent of the sites blocked were chat or instant messaging sites, 14.6 percent contained advertising, 7.2 percent involved Web mail, while 3.9 percent represented pornographic sites.

During the last week a site that was often visited was the betting site, Bodog.com according to Nadir. Approximately 53 percent of the visits during the previous week, that were to gambling sites, were to sports betting sites rather than online casinos or lottery sites. When asked by email if their business has suffered from the now law, Bodog did not respond.

Of ScanSafe's total customer base, about eighty-four percent had blockages of employee attempts to access gambling sites. The two main reasons that their clients are blocking their employees from visiting gambling sites is their belief that such sites are not safe and that they do not want employees playing games of chance on the company’s time, said Nadir.

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