Canadian Bingo Site Playnow.com Launched

Sissy · **Posted:** Mon Jul 19, 2010 10:01 am

Credit to: Richard Chaso

Quote:

The British Columbia Lottery Corporation's (BCLC) PlayNow.com, dubbed North America's first “government-sanctioned online casino”, was launched on Friday and, by 4pm the same day, the site crashed and is still not operational.

President of BCLC, Michael Graydon, said that the great success of the website proved its undoing as PlayNow.com crashed due to being too popular: "It's been an overwhelming success with people in British Columbia to the point where we hit 100% capacity in the first day...so we decided to close the site down for a half a day, and add some new hardware and servers...”.

Vice president of corporate affairs, Kevin Gass, confirmed that their gambling site wasn't ready for the unexpected demand: “We have load-bearing servers that simply were not handling the job properly, and on that basis we made the decision (to close for maintenance).”

Residents of British Columbia spend around Cdn100 million (£60m) a year on online gambling, and the government were, of course, keen to keep that money in B.C. and make it taxable, hence the first legal online casino was introduced. But the creators of the site should have realised that demand would be massive as, not only do people spend that much money in online gambling per year, but there are around 2,000 unregulated online sites in B.C. Introduce a legal site and the demand should be obvious!

PlayNow.com is expected to be fully functional from tomorrow (Tuesday) after it was only meant to be closed for the rest of Friday.

Sissy · **Posted:** Sat Jul 24, 2010 8:46 am

The British Columbia Lottery Corporation shut down its new online casino site after it verified last week over a hundred accounts had their security breached. CEO Michael Graydon announced yesterday that a relaunch of the Internet gambling site last Thursday left some accounts vulnerable and accessible by users other than account holders.

According to Graydon, at least $8000 was wagered by persons other than account owners, and account information was also visible when it should have been hidden. At least one instance arose in which credit card information was partially revealed.

The lottery operator had said the site was shut down after the relaunch because of traffic overloads. Friday, company representatives had promised the online casino would quickly return, without mentioning the security failure.

Graydon defended the action, saying the first responsibility of the lottery was to the people whose accounts were compromised.

“We wanted to make sure that they heard from BCLC and not read it in the newspaper,"said the CEO.

Critics of the online gambling plan said the government and the lottery corporation had lied about the mishap. But Graydon made clear that once concerned parties were notified, the accident was revealed to the general public.

The site staff became aware of the issue when a player called consumer affairs at the lottery to say he was viewing another player's information.

Graydon promised the site would not reopen until all security leaks were thoroughly plugged.

Preston Lewis

Canadian Bingo Site Playnow.com Launched

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