Online Gambling Issues
Online Gambling Issues
Online gambling is any form of gambling conducted over the internet. This includes casinos, virtual poker and online sports betting among others. The first online gambling venue open to the public, was ticket selling for the first Liechtenstein International Poker Tournament in October 1994. Since then there have been many successful online gambling ventures, which has made online gambling more popular today.
There are a number of online gambling sites available on the World Wide Web. These sites allow the online gamblers to wager a minimum amount and enjoy the benefits of playing online from the comfort of their own home. Most of these sites provide a safe and secure environment for players to wager their money. This allows players to place their bet without having to worry about the security and privacy of their account information being divulged to third parties. However, before you go ahead and play any form of online gambling, it is important to state that there are some particular laws and regulations that need to be adhered to in order to ensure that you do not become a victim of online gambling.
There are two main bodies that regulate online gambling in the United States; the US Senate and House of Representatives and the US House of Representatives. Their jurisdiction comes from the laws that are placed by the federal government and the state governments. While most online gambling sites have their operations based out of the USA, some may also have their gambling facilities based out of other countries such as Romania, Costa Rica and China.
Apart from regulating the online gambling sites, the World Wide Web Commission also acts as an advisory body for ensuring that the online gambling sites adhere to its rules and regulations. This commission’s scope of work revolves around the issues of privacy, gambling crimes. In fact, they conduct regular seminars and forums on these topics to provide the gamers and online gambling site owners with the necessary information on how they can protect themselves from any type of fraud and identity theft. This commission also tries to educate the public about the problems associated with online gambling, the impact of online gambling and the need for adequate regulation of the online gambling industry.
The US Senate is more likely to take a positive view towards online gambling because the majority of members of the upper house are avid gamers themselves. They understand the risks involved in gambling online and the issues concerning identity theft and cyber crime perfectly well. As such, they are more likely to support online gambling regulation of online gambling sites accordingly. However, it is up to the representatives in the lower house to ensure that any online gambling legislation has teeth so that the interests of the general population are protected from online scams and frauds.
For all the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the issue of online gambling regulation is not an easy one to tackle. However, if the general public will come out in support of online regulation of online gambling sites then the politicians would have no choice but to seriously address the issue of online gambling. The recent Silk Road scam exposed the lack of regulation around many offshore gambling sites which allowed people to withdraw large sums of money and use the credit cards provided to them. If the general public understood how serious online gaming scams are, then they might think twice about participating in online gaming.