Sports Betting Sites Soar During Super Bowl Week
A law banning U.S. banks and credit card companies from processing payments to online gambling sites hasn't stopped Americans from visiting sports betting sites, often during work hours on their office PCs, according to online security vendor ScanSafe.
Visits to online gambling Web sites by employees of ScanSafe's U.S. customers -- major corporations -- were up 77 percent in the week between Jan. 23 and 31. The Super Bowl, the National Football League's championship game, was Sunday February 4, and featured the Indianapolis Colts demolishing the hapless Chicago Bears, led by the clueless quarterback Rex Grossman.
ScanSafe provides scans for six billion Web requests a month for corporate clients with enterprise computing networks.
Bush Bash
President George Bush last fall signed a law barring banks from processing payments to gambling sites. The government is planning to unveil the processing regulations for financial institutions.The gambling bill, inserted by Congress into a homeland security bill in late September, has had absolutely no impact on the number of people visiting gambling Web sites, said Dan Nadir, vice president for product strategy at ScanSafe.
"We suspected the law wouldn't have much of an impact," Nadir said. "Some gambling sites will develop alternative payment mechanisms."
The online security firm didn't provide the raw numbers of visits to gambling sites this past week, but gambling represented about 3.4 percent of the content it blocked for clients in 2006. By contrast, 15.1 percent of the blocked content was chat or instant messaging, 14.6 percent was advertising, 7.2 percent was Web mail.
Surfing to sports betting sites such as Bodog.com was quite common this past week, Nadir said. About 53 percent of the U.S. visits to gambling sites ScanSafe observed this past week were to sports betting sites, as opposed to casinos.
Nearly 84 percent of ScanSafe's customers tried to block employee access to gambling sites, not out of loyalty to President Bush, but because they don't want employees entertaining themselves on corporate time, experts said.
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