In Run-Up To The Super Bowl, Americans Are Still Visiting Gambling Sites

The Super Bowl, the National Football League’s championship game, is this Sunday and attempted visits to online sports gambling sites by employees of ScanSafe’s U.S. customers were up 77 percent. ScanSafe provides a Web-blocking service to large businesses, and it examines 6 billion Web requests a month.

Last October, President Bush signed a measure prohibiting financial institutions from processing payments to gambling sites into law. But some online gambling sites have begun telling U.S. customers that financial institutions are already distancing themselves. On Wednesday, PokerRoom.com told U.S. customers to cash out.

“The companies that process cashouts from PokerRoom.com to our players in the United States have contacted us to say that they will no longer facilitate these transactions,” said a message on PokerRoom’s home page. “As such, we would advise all American players who have not cashed out already to do so immediately.”

The gambling provision, amended by Congress by being tacked onto a ports security bill in late September, has had 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.”

ScanSafe 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 comparison, 15.1 percent of the blocked content consisted of chat or instant messaging, 14.6 percent was advertising, 7.2 percent was Web mail, and 3.9 percent was pornography.

About 84 percent of ScanSafe’s customers blocked employee access to gambling sites. Companies block employees from gambling sites for a couple of reasons: because they don’t trust that gambling sites are safe, and because they don’t want employees playing games on company time, Nadir said.

Nadir said that Bodog.com received its normal number of visitors this past week. About 53 percent of the U.S. visits to gambling sites ScanSafe observed this past week were to sports betting sites as opposed to casino or lottery sites. Bodog didn’t respond to an e-mail asking if its business has been hurt by the U.S. law.

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