BC gaming site farce ‘good news’
p2pnet view Games | P2P:- British Columbia is backing North America’s first official online casino. And already it’s turning into a farce.
In what the BCLC is trying to spin as a “data crossover“, the accounts of well over 100 punters were wide open to other players “who were also online at the time”, it admits.
But this isn’t the first mess that’s landed squarely on the BCLC’s doorstep.
The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) hit the crown corporation with a $670,000 fine for allegedly misfiling more than 1,000 reports of $10,000 transactions at its offline casinos.
Now “money laundering” and “terrorist financing” have been thrown into the equation.
“B.C.’s Liberals are suckling so greedily at the teats of their gambling cash cow that they’re helping criminals destroy our communities”, writes Ethan Baron in The Province.
A November FINTRAC report found 20% of “money laundering and terrorist financing cases uncovered in Canada in 2008-09 occurred in casinos”, says the story, going on >>>
All 112 cases involved money laundering, with five of them linked to “terrorist-activity financing and/or threats to the security of Canada,” the report says. Half of the cases involved laundering of drug-trade profits, and a fifth of them were conducted by organized criminals, including biker gangs, street gangs and “traditional” international criminal gangs.
“In nearly 70 per cent of casino cases, money launderers used cash from crime to buy chips, which, after ‘minimal play,’ they turned in for a casino cheque”, says The Province, adding:
“This results in providing an air of legitimacy as to the source of the funds,” the report says.
Meanwhile, BCLC vice-president Kevin Gass has tried to rotate the debacle as “good news”.
“Due to tremendous interest and traffic associated with the launch of casino games on PlayNow.com on July 15th, BCLC servers experienced load issues causing what is technically referred to as a ‘data crossover’,” said a BCLC puff piece.
Now, “It was tremendous customer response — that’s the good news” Gass told Jonathan Fowlie in the Vancouver Sun.
“There was tremendous traffic and that seemed to cause a technical problem … That should not have happened but it did.”
Stay tuned.
… and identi.ca
data crossover – Giant BC government gaming screw-up, July 21, 2010
The Province – Lax BCLC reporting lets criminals flourish, July 21, 2010
Vancouver Sun – Five days late, the truth about a security breach emerges, July 21, 2010
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July 21st, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Just goes to show that there should be mandatory privacy and data breach reporting, and open to the public to scrutinize. Because you never know when a “data crossover” will occur with e-health.
But, alas, hiding & spinning the truth is Canadian & provincial governments way of doing things.
Now what happens when e-voting comes in? Will BC have another “data crossover”? One which we would never find out about that would be described in the media as a “dissociation of ballots”? I expect it.
July 22nd, 2010 at 11:31 am
People were goign to the site becuase they were offering for a limited time $10 worth of tokens to play the new casino games with. They also had an area where you could play for free just to test out the games.
The money laundering part is always going on. Ive seen people sit down at tables get 3k worth of chips and play for a few minutes then cash out. Cash in their chips, get a reciept for it and then go back to another table and do the same thing. With in 2 hours they would leave with 15k in reciepts.
Also last year certain casinos were fined but because of security issues those infractions were never released to the public.