Bot Attacks Threaten Online Casinos, Players

by Mira Patel, News Staff Writer

October 15, 2007

Back in the days when brick-and-mortar casino play was the only option for gambling enthusiasts, the activities of unsavory, money-laundering gangsters tarnished the reflection of the whole industry. Nowadays, online casinos are falling prey to a similar fate, thanks to crooks trying to flush dirty money through the system. Online gambling is big business these days, and the online casino industry has grown more massive than could ever have been conceived-of back in the days of land-based gaming. Before you get images of Capone-esque “family men” clicking a mouse ominously while chain smoking cigars, however, think again – most of the scams being perpetrated against internet casinos are human-free in nature, thanks to the enterprising work of intelligently programmed bots.

Full Tilt Poker, a popular online casino site, recently came under attack by one or more virtual criminals, who used a non-reflective bot program to spam legitimate online gambling members of the internet casino into forking over their account information and password, and subsequently bleeding their account dry. Full Tilt ended up shelling out over three million dollars in restitution to defrauded players. Other variations of the scam involve transferring “dirty” money –siphoned from stolen credit cards or massive illegal drug transactions- to a pre-selected winner in the goal of laundering it. Other bot scams involve tapping into the fixed mathematical advantage calculations of online casinos’ games, and rigging them against legit players so that they lose more money.

Internet security firm Symantec commented that the “bot-herding” activity being seen at online casinos is very new, and therefore, not fully understood. Until new protections against these scams can be devised, online casino sites and online gambling players will have to keep their guard up, so that they don’t get taken for a ride.

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