Mississippi Casinos’ Image and Likness Used as Part of iGaming Scams

While the United States and gambling regulators have been fighting off offshore operators, sweepstakes social casinos, and prediction markets, at least those adversaries have used a sort of legal basis for what they do.

Far worse, however, is the plague of online casinos and gambling sites that co-opt the image and likeness of land-based gambling companies and flood the Internet with advertisements that people may now gamble online, using the companies’ branding as a guarantee for their legitimacy.

Fraudsters Continue to Target Land-Based Casinos, Posing as Online Counterparts

This is, of course, a scam, as Mississippi does not allow Internet casinos just yet, but this has not made fraudsters to desist. Golden Nugget general manager and VP Chett Harrison has been among the high-ranking casino executives to warn against this practice.

“It’s difficult. I’ve looked at some of them that I couldn’t even tell the email address was different until I slowed down to check it,” Harrison explained, arguing that even industry insiders could be taken in at first glance if they do not have the reflex to slow down their roll and check.

These scams are not mincing their words and they don’t want you to look too closely, so they shove something more prominent right in your face. These scams usually promise potential victims $1,500 for simply signing up, about which Harrison simply states – if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

“To gamble in any state where it’s approved is going to require an app; you’re not just going to go into a website and enter your information and gamble,” Harisson says, but scammers are not too worried about this as their victims will be people who are not aware that this is the case.

Scammers Are Not Just After Your Deposits – They Want Your Personal Info

Rather, they will assume that a reputable brand would not allow its name to be misused, and this is true – but the scammers do not mind launching multiple such fraudulent campaigns in a bid to secure unwitting players who then venture to reveal personal and financial information that can be exploited for nefarious purposes.

The scammers, Harrison warns, are not interested in necessarily turning a profit, when they can leverage anything – from deposits to your personal data to extract value.