Uh-oh.
Last March, I did a
post about how the 60 Minutes crews were interviewing online poker players and digging into the cheating scandal at Absolute Poker. A few months later,
another scandal broke out at UltimateBet, which happened to be owned by the same company.
At the time, I thought the results of the investigation would be televised shortly.
I was wrong about that, and over the ensuing months I gradually forgot all about the story. I kinda figured that maybe
60 Minutes shelved the story.
Not so.
According to CBS, they will be broadcasting that story this Sunday.
You can see a preview of the story here.
As you will see from the clip, this does not look like your run of the mill puff-piece. They are going to talk about the cheating. In detail.
Frankly, I don't know whether to be ecstatic or very scared.
On the one side, this is a story that needs to be told. Not only is it an interesting story about smart people using their brains to solve a crime that the nobody else was taking seriously, but it also underlines a fundamental lack of security that exists at some online gaming companies.
On the other hand, this lack of control is not an industry-wide issue, and I am afraid that some shrill voices will take these isolated incidents and use them to promote their idea of prohibition.
Ideally, the ultimate result will be something in the middle.
Frankly, we DO need some more security oversight over the industry.
The fact that the management of Absolute Poker and UltimateBet allowed these events to occur and the Kahnawake Gaming Commission did so little in the form of punishment shows that the free market is not working in this situation.
Neither site really suffered for the scandals. Both are thriving and I am pretty sure that most of their current customers have no idea about the situation.
So hopefully, this publicity leads to some debate about the need for regulation - not prohibition.
If that is the result, then this is definintely a great thing for the industry.