We are pleased to release today our study on Internet Gambling Cybercrime, concluded in July 2006.

This study is currently in French and openly downloadable.

For english speaking readers that hate babelfish marmelade, here are the insights:

• we discovered 14k websites that propose Internet gambling services such as betting, casino or lottery
• offering breakdown is as follows: 31% only offer casino playing, 5% betting, 2% lottery, and 62% of websites provide multiple offerings (note that online lottery is mainly provided by email-hum...I mean spam)
• 2000 websites have puchased a gambling licence: 391 in Costa-Rica, 383 in Antigua, 331 in Kahnawake, 330 in Netherlands Antilles...
• the average net revenue per player is 40$/month

The study analyses the fraudulent modus operandi conducted by online gambling operators (spam, DNS hijacking, malware infection, unpaid gains, success rate manipulation, credit card theft, money laundering, IRS fraud...).

Following our investigations in this area, we estimate that a thousand of gambling websites are directly operated by criminal groups. These groups are commonly involved in different areas such as porn/pedo contents, phishing, credit card theft, extorsion, scams in general and online gambling services (mainly used for infection and laundering).

Online gambling is a 15b$ market, already 10% of the overall gaming market. And this has become the playfield for scammers.

Illegal to provide gambling services?

Yes for 99% of the websites we discovered, mainly because you may have to ban visitors from Germany, US, Japan, Spain, France...almost from any country.

But don't be disappointed, there is a whole industry to help you if you still think that's a good business: offshore companies and banking accounts, nominees, one-click software applications to run your business. You can even buy an anonymous gambling licence in Costa-Rica for 10k$. If you have success, you even can run for an IPO on stock exchanges. Financial analysts say "well there is a legal risk... but look at revenues !".
We're just at the begininng of the fight and some CEOs have been arrested this month: Sportingbet or Bwin for example.

Some have also taken radical measures, such as the Italian AAMS (Amministrazione Autonoma dei Monopoli di Stato) that forced Italian operators to ban access to 600 gambling websites. For each italian that accesses one of these sites, telecom operators can receive a fine of 180.000$.