The British tabloids have been plastered with headlines concerning the bout of street riots going on in many of Great Britain’s major cities. With that in mind, news of every other sort had sort of taken a back seat, except of course for football news, with the Premier League starting up last weekend. It took a little bit of searching, but I was able to find a couple of gambling related stories that took place in the UK over the past few weeks.
Betfair is one of Britain’s top online gambling sites, and has been at the top of the gaming heap since its arrival online in 2000. When they finally decided to go public, Betfair started out fine, but has since struggled to convince investors that they are worth their initial 1.4 billion pound value. The floatation has since turned into a debacle, and it only got worse when two of Betfair’s outgoing executives David Yu and Stephen Morana were given huge pay raises. It’s now unsure whether anyone believes the online gambling site is a good bet.
Las Vegas casino site caesarsbingo.com was left a little red faced when, courtesy of a mathematical computer glitch; it was forced to pay out thousands of pounds to a bunch of British bingo players. The error came when the site made the costly mistake of allowing users to amass real money using their deposit bonuses, which they then promptly cashed out. Word spread quickly among online players, and pretty soon the amount being paid out added up very quickly.
The error has now been fixed with Caesars saying they will allow some users to keep their winning if they earned it because of computer error, but other users, particularly those who spread the word about the mistake, have had their accounts suspended pending investigation. This is why, when you sign up at an online casino, you have to be sure to read the small print; sometimes when something seems too good to be true, it really is.