Internet casinos have become the latest and greatest new thing for the internet and they have been introduced under what can only be fairly described as a storm of controversy. You will be hard pressed to find an industry that has managed to polarise public opinion so severely, and there have been people from all angles of the political spectrum either trying to outlaw them outright, or bring them back in.
Internet casinos have been lambasted by grandstanding politicians on a number of grounds, on the basis that they are a haven for tax evasion and provide the necessary framework which is essential to the conducting of money laundering. Others have went one step further, and actually accused and condemned Internet casinos as being the brain child of terrorist groups because of the easy access to funding that they provide. This, ladies and gentlemen is despite the fact that there has been NO credible evidence produced to this date that terrorist bodies are in anyway, shape or form connected to the Internet casino industry.
Some of the politicians who jumped on the proverbial bandwagon in order to point the finger of suspicion on the Internet casino profession have sought to rely upon more traditional complaints, such as the sites are creating record numbers of gambling addicts. The problem here is that whilst they are using the correct statistics and figures, they are applying and processing them in a very highly skewered way which has the effect of distorting the final result.
Without getting too bogged down or overly focused upon the nuances of advanced mathematics here, the issue concerning the faulty number crunching can be summarised as this. More people are using Internet casinos in order to gamble and place a wager on the respective games that are on offer, and are betting more frequently. Therefore, not only is there is a higher volume of bets because more people use the internet sites, but they are also playing for longer which means that they wager more bets in a given period of time.
Therefore, even if the rate of addiction remains exactly the same between an Internet casino and a physical casino, the politicians take the results and argue that the Internet casino is much more risky purely because the statistics indicate that there is a higher number of addicts. This can be attributed to the higher volume of betters, and therefore it is important to appreciate a very fundamental aspect of statistics: correlation does not always equal causation.
The future of Internet casinos in America remains to be seen, although there has been a significant shift towards abolishing many of the laws that were passed under the former administration in order to open the doors for online gambling to become a mainstream activity.
Please note that this is not intended as an exercise in allowing constitutional rights to be fairly and properly exercised (although there can be no denying that it is an added bonus) the grim reality is that the prohibition of Internet casinos is costing the federal government trillions of lost revenue. Given that this money which can go a very long way to resurrecting the economy it is plain to see that the government is finally coming to appreciate the cost factor.
Whenever the government passed the law designed to prohibit and curb the Internet casino industry from expanding any further, this was motivated by one thing: tax revenue leaving the country, or at the very least, the possibility of that happening.
The bitter irony here is that the Internet casino industry has not stopped, it has merely set up shop elsewhere other than the USA and therefore this means that the government has lost out on a wonderful opportunity to collect a major chunk of change. Furthermore, by scattering the industry to a patchwork mash of different legal jurisdictions the US government has also directly placed its citizens at risk of harm from unscrupulous website owners who are not bound by such stringent regulations.
An issue that has reared its ugly head time and time again in relation to the Internet casino industry has been that of the risk of financial details of the customers being compromised and even stolen. Therefore, irrespective of how well known a particular gaming site appears to be, make sure that you take a good look at the level of protection that is offered for your financial details. Ideally, you should only ever use a website that features “SSL” or Secure Socket Layer technology as this is one of the most powerful forms of encryption on the internet and is recognised as an industry standard.
One of the easiest ways to tell whether or not SSL technology is being used with a particular website is to check the URL at the top of the screen. If you happen to see https:// then that means that you have accessed the webpage in question using a secure connection which utilises the SSL encryption algorithm.
All of this may sound rather extravagant and overly cautious, but the internet is a very dangerous place to the careless user and so if you are not prepared to exercise due diligence in order to ensure that you do not place yourself at unnecessary risk then you will suffer badly for your foolishness.
Many people regard the Internet casino industry with a harsh combination of suspicion and hostility as the Internet casino websites are labelled and condemned as little more than unethical, profiteering leeches that are exploiting people by setting unfair odds in their own favour, and by abusing addicts. Nothing could be further from the truth, and like all other forms of assumption we have small measures of the truth which have then been significantly diluted by virtue of mistaken belief, passing itself as dogma.
First off, an increasing number of Internet casino websites are now accredited and recognised by the G4 group or the Global Gambling Guidance Group, which is a regulatory watchdog body which ensures that Internet casino website actually implement safety protocol for gambling addiction. Therefore, all staff involved in the mechanics of a Internet casino website must be trained to identify the symptoms of gambling addiction and where such a situation should arise and present itself, to deal with the situation as required.
No doubt the last paragraph will have elicited a snigger or two from the less charitable readers, as they think to themselves:
“You are asking the company to police themselves. How on earth can they expect for websites to be upfront and honest about their support system?”
The answer is very simple: if the G4 group should discover that a website has been negligent or otherwise lacking in its obligation of care to the members, action can and will be taken which can include the site being closed down for a period of time. The website owners may also face criminal and civil charges for their actions, and be required to pay compensation to the gambling addict.
In an attempt to tackle this issue as well as identify the risk factors involved, there has been a considerable amount of research involved into the correlation and causation issues between rates of addiction and the Internet casino industry. Part of the problem lies in the fact that Internet casinos are open 24 hours a day meaning that they are infinitely more accessible than their real life counterparts. Given that gamblers can bet for longer periods of time, this makes it even easier for them to wager even more money than ever before.
However, the flipside to this is that given that most patrons of gambling sites will use their own personal computer, and this is especially true of someone who has a dependency upon gambling (as they attempt to conceal their activities and the amount of time as well as money spent on such sites). Therefore, their IP address (the unique number which is allocated to their computer as they surf the internet) will be recorded and duly noted by the Internet casino logs.
This means that it is actually easier for an Internet casino to identify players who are spending unhealthy amounts of time playing or using their services. If you are concerned that a player could alternate between different casino games in an attempt to further shield themselves from investigation, the logs are centralised meaning that any player who accesses the site will have their details stored on this central database.
It is important to appreciate that with a site that has certification issued from the G4 group, there is no singular department/personnel member who is totally responsible for spotting and identifying a gambling addict, for ALL staff, irrespective of rank or station is trained to spot the warning signs and legally obligated to take due action should some be merited.
There has been a number of arguments from sociologists and psychologists that the absence of a peer base within the Internet casino (after all, it is an entirely lonely process, devoid of human contact) makes it even easier for a person to slip into the murky waters of gambling addiction. However, there has been an emerging trend for people to argue that the absence of other people means that one of the most potent variables involved in risk taking behaviour, i.e. peer pressure is conspicuously absent. On that basis then, Internet casinos are actually a little safer than their domestic counterparts.
If we were to be perfectly blunt about the internet casino sensation it is not fair to accuse them of enticing people to slip into the depths of addiction, because this totally removes the sense of responsibility that all gamblers, whether they are addicts or not, must take for their own actions. Whilst it is easy to criticise Internet casinos for their slick design, and 24/7 opening hours, the truth of the matter is that if a person is genuinely having a problem using such sites....they can always block them from their computer.
There is a number of content filter software available on the internet, some of this which happens to be free, others which are commercially licensed and therefore will require a subscription fee in order for you to use them. However, the usefulness of these computer programs can neither be denied or underestimated for they will put the user in the powerful condition of being able to block out an entire niche of websites.