On Monday, when I reported on the fact that Canada’s first online casino had been shut down, like everyone else I reported the reason as too much traffic for the servers. Now it seems that may not be the truth.

On Friday, only hours after PlayNow.com was launched as Canada’s first online casino, the site went down. At the time, a spokesman for the British Columbia Lottery Corporation said that the site was down because of too much traffic to the site. Well, I should have known better than to take the word of a government employee.

On Tuesday, the Lottery Corporation admitted that a security breach was the reason for the website being shut down. It seems that on Friday, twelve gamblers playing on the online casino website had their private information accidentally shared with other users. The Lottery Corp. assures everyone that nothing as sensitive as credit card information was shared, but members did get access to the user names, session time, money spent during the session and account balance.

This happened because of a type of loading glitch called a “data crossover.” When members logged into the online casino, they inexplicably found themselves accessing someone else’s account. Everyone affected by the security glitch has been notified by authorities and are taking the proper precautions to protect themselves. However, the casino website won’t be re-launched until the Lottery Corp. is certain that the glitch has been corrected and that no such security breach will occur again. In the meantime, Canadians who want to play casino games are out of luck.

So why did we first hear that overloaded servers caused a crash of the website, rather than it purposely being shut down because of a software problem that poses a security risk? Well, it certainly sounds better, doesn’t it? Would you rather say “our business is so successful that we couldn’t handle the demand” or “we accidentally shared sensitive account information with other players?”

Some critics have said that the Lottery Corp. rushed the website before it was ready to launch. Though the BCLC insists that’s not the case, the severe security glitch begs to differ. Sometimes it’s best to let the pros, who have been running online casinos for a while, run the casino business. Governments tend to ruin everything they touch, as may be the case here. Legalizing online gambling in the province is a good move, but having the government run an online casino may be too much for them to handle. Admittedly, I don’t know a whole lot about Canada’s governments, but I know governments in general, and they tend to be horrible at running businesses.

The online casino at PlayNow.com was the first online casino established in North America, at least for a couple hours. Other provinces in Canada, such as Quebec, are considering following British Columbia’s lead and opening their own casino for additional tax and permit revenue.

Tags: British Columbia Lottery Corporation, British Columbia online casino, Canada online casino, Canadian online casino, online casino, online gambling, PlayNow.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.