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Advertisements Bring Online Casinos In Problems
For a while it looked for a while that online casinos could get away with anything because they were outside the jurisdiction of land laws. There seems to be coming an and to all this freedom, and online casinos are going have to pay for it. In the United Kingdom online casinos will be held responsible for breaking the law, for advertising their casinos within the UK without keeping their limitations.
At the same time, a similar kind of action is taking place in the United States were the Department of Justice has successfully warned the American advertising media that they are participating in an criminal activity when they place online casinos ads in the media.
Online casinos spend incredible amounts of money on advertisements in the London Underground, in the newspapers and on the sides of taxis to attract new players to their websites. Their only restriction is that they are not allowed to display any advertisements that promote any kind of offers like free entries to tournaments, welcome bonuses or how high the jackpots are.
It is very interesting that online casinos are allowed to advertise, while land based casinos are prohibited from posting any type of advertisement within the borders of the UK. Apparently this issue has also reached the UK government and the Gambling commission and they decided that this can't go on any longer.
The Gambling Commission, that was set up last month to monitor the Gambling Act 2005 (even though the Act will only come into force in two years from now), and the department of Culture, Media and Sports decided to write letters to advertisers, online casinos operators and publishers to remind them about the limitations in advertisements they need to respect. If not, online casinos will officially be breaking the law and they will be prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service of advertisers and publishers. This means that there is a big chance that they will have to pay millions of dollars to the government for not keeping the restrictions.
In the Financial Times, the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, stated that these online casinos who break the law will be prosecuted. She added that everyone knows that several online casinos have broken the law and she won't be turning a blind eye to this after agreeing with the Gaming Commission that something needs to be done to stop unlawful advertisement of online gambling operations.
Rumors are, that the actions of the UK government started after a complaint of the Methodist Church in October this year. One of the online casinos placed a poster in the London underground, showing a the comedian and TV Star Roland Rivran playing at one of the online casinos at a laptop, sitting in a bar with a drink in his hand. This association between drinking and online casinos was too much for the Methodist Church, an association who already is completely against online casinos in general, even without the drinking part?
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