One of the biggest betting days of the year will happen on Sunday when the Super Bowl takes place, and US-owned betting firms have turned to spamming in Europe to get customers to replace American ones prohibited by laws from gambling online.
Casino Spam Royale
A Canadian tech writer I correspond with on occasion expressed surprise that we in the United States can't place a bet on a sporting event unless we happen to be at one of the legal sports books in Nevada.
Online betting here has been frowned upon regularly by the Republican government, which passed laws making the use of credit cards and electronic fund transfer services for Internet gambling illegal.
Those laws have been more than inconvenient for the online companies that profit from such betting. The legislation dried up a significant pool of bettors, and left those sites looking for replacements.
Security researcher Kevin McGhee at McAfee blogged that the US-run betting firms have turned to spamming European addresses to find bettors. McGhee said that the spam really escalated in December 2006, when one day 10 percent of all the spam they saw came from casinos:
One spam campaign has been translated into several European languages including German, Dutch and Italian. The website being spammed is localized in at least 5 European languages but the telephone number on the website is from the U.S. and is answered by someone with an American accent!
McGhee also noted that one spammer specifically welcomes US bettors to its gambling site. It probably won't do people much good to try it, since payment methods they would likely use are forbidden now by US law.
Last month, the Justice Department reportedly warned Google and Yahoo to stay away from gambling-related advertising. This action would keep underage Internet users from seeing those ads appear in pop-ups; that may mean Justice does not want to keep seeing affiliate companies who work with search advertising companies to have gambling ads available in their inventory.
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