Home » OCW News » August 2010 » BC Online Casino PlayNow.com Successfully Relaunched

BC Online Casino PlayNow.com Successfully Relaunched

Date published: 24 August 2010

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At the end of last week, online gambling fans in the Canadian province of British Columbia were very happy to see the relaunch of PlayNow.com, the country's, and indeed North America's, first government-sanctioned online casino.

Said B.C. Lottery Corp's Michael Graydon, 'Approval to put the site back up was provided by the province's gambling policy and enforcement branch and the BC information and privacy commissioner following a review by consulting firm Deloitte.'

When the site was launched on Thursday, July 15, everything was going well and in just a few hours boasted 140,000 new player sign-ups. However, it was abruptly shut down as a result of a major security breach. PlayNow.com had in fact been hacked.

As a result of being hacked, some players gained unauthorized access to the private account details of other players, forcing the shutdown. What should have been a momentous moment for BC, left egg on the faces of many people at PlayNow.com.

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As such, until the site's relaunch, B.C. Lottery Corporation paid an independent gaming technology firm to fix the casino's security issues. Meanwhile, the shutdown reportedly cost the Canadian province approximately $150,000 a day in lost revenues.

However, Graydon was quick to explain that prior to launch, PlayNow.com underwent three months of testing, but that the issue wasn't picked up because of a set of unique and unforeseen circumstances that caused secure user information to be exposed.

But even PlayNow.com's relaunch was not without a glitch. It was supposed to go live at 7pm local time, but actually went live a few hours later. However, it is now operational, and is attracting new players by the truckload from across British Columbia.