Month: July 2014

If you have invested a lot of time into your favorite online game and/or
invested some money into that game, your first priority should be the
security of that account and it’s assets.  Of course, this is alao true
of your PC, tablet, or cell phone.  The reasoning is simple, there are
thousands of cyber criminals out there that want your stuff!

 

 

One of the most common is called phishing.  It is simple, you get an email or
instant message from the game’s administator saying that for serious reasons
you need to re-login to the provided link.  But the link goes to a malicious
site that records your login credentials.  Possibly to recover your account
or to start a new gaming session, even in order to save your game stats.

 

 

 

 
You might be thinking: “nah, not my stuff, I only have a little”. That is
the oldest mistake in the book and the cyber criminals rely on that weakness.

 
Trust me when I say, these guys are staying up late at night thinking of new
ways to trick you into revealing your passwords or otherwise trying to get
into your account.  They will stop at nothing.

Australia:

A few kids have been caught making the decision to skip their high school
classes and head to the local internet cafe in order to play online games.
Seven boys were found to be skipping school on February 25 and 14 boys were
busted on March 12.

 

 

Maybe they think going to school is only their parent’s idea and that only
their parents insist on their attendance?  Well, now these 21 boys have
found out that skipping school is actually against the law and could cost
their parents upto $11,000 fine.

 

 

However, in the above cases, it was the boy’s first offense, so they had
to attend counseling and other intervention-type of classes to get them
back on track.

 

 

It is sort of amazing that these kids can not wait until after school to
play their games, but maybe there are problems at home that interfer with
their play.  More than likely, they just think school is boring and that
skipping school is cool.  There is a lot of peer pressure to be ‘cool’ at
the ages of 14 to 18, the high school age.  But skipping school will not
make them look cool to any of the ‘A’ students, only to the other low
level students.

According to the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, such as, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration, online
gambling is perfect the setup for money laundering.

 

 

 

 

The typical scheme would be for the criminal to buys chips at a casino, play for a few minutes,
then cash out where they would get a receipt which they can claim the money is from winnings.
It is also possible for a casino owner to accept a large payment of illicit cash but then
deposit it as though gamblers lost it at the tables.  Both of these methods, and many more,
can be done with online casinos quicker and easier than offline brick and mortar casinos.
This is especially true now with bitcoins being so popular and accepted not only at gambling
sites but also with hundreds mainstream merchants.  And then there is TOR, the software that
anyone can run on the computer which hides their IP address and therefore hided their location.

 

 

Another clever scheme would be for the criminal to deliberately lose a poker hand to
a politician, that cash then acts as a bribe or kickback.

 

 

Already, without online gambling in US, this is not a small, isolated problem. In 1996, the
International Monetary Fund estimated that 2–5% of the worldwide global economy involved
laundered money.