Hard Rock Atlantic City’s online gaming provider Gaming Innovation Group has recently been slapped with a $25,000 fine after a gambler who was not located within the state’s borders accessed their site in New Jersey and went to place a $29 sports bet. According to officials from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE), a vulnerability was detected last summer and this is what allowed the gambler who is based in Nevada to trick the GiG-powered online casino to think that the person was located in the state. The illicit user lost the $29 bet but the software provider lost much more for the mistake.
“This one-off single incidence of out-of-state gambling was due to a technical vulnerability which was quickly discovered and reported to the regulator in New Jersey in the first week the company went live in New Jersey. An end-user from outside the state of New Jersey with technical knowledge managed to access the front-end debugger to change the location and pretend to be from New Jersey,” Gaming Innovation Groups commented on the matter.
Fortunately, the geolocation company that was checking the technology used by the casino when it detected the issued reported that they shut down the system after which a fix was provided by the next day in order to ensure that the same thing did not occur again.
In this day and age, geolocation technology plays a major role in online gambling operations both in the United States and the rest of the world. It uses several different layers to determine the location of the customers of any particular online gambling site. In case the player is found not to be located within a particular location and is trying to access services that are specific to that place, they are denied access.
Even though people who are opposed to the legalization of online gambling have long claimed that websites cannot adequately protect themselves against illicit access by players from outside the legalized territories of these services, many of the geolocation companies have differed. The proponents to of this technology believe that most, if not all, of these concerns, are largely unfounded especially in today’s technological world.
More Regulatory Crackdown
Needless to say, New Jersey is one of the strictest online gaming jurisdictions in the United States. The state’s gaming regulator is not just going after the online gaming operators that fail to comply with the geolocation requirements but it also targeting other kinds of offenders.
