The BME experience update is in place… Thank you to the writers and staff who helped create it, and especially to Vicky for her bulk of features — I think the most one person has ever written in a single update?
Anyway, enjoy the update, and be sure to check out Jim Ward's first column on the history of modern body modification, an almost totally undocumented subject. Oh, and that's Xeon on the cover.
PS. I'm glad Jill didn't die!
Some of you probably have already seen this story on online bookmaking via Slashdot, but since online casinos are how I “made my first fortune” I thought I'd tell a part of my story as well, starting back in late 1994 (WIRED magazine later covered our site in Issue 3.10). Because of being the first online casino to open, we generated monstrous amounts of press — we got into it because at the time we were developing phone sex software and stuff like that and many of the early online casino operators came from that market.
We were uniquely positioned because we'd designed our IVR software to be gaming-oriented and had casino-like functionality built in from the group up. While we were monstrously inexperienced when it came to web development (luckily so was everyone else back then) — as evidenced by the atrocious web design — we were in the right place at the right time.
The character we worked with was an odd one — his “office” was set up as a giant candy store, built around a six foot globe gumball machine and surrounded by cutting edge computers. He regularly filled the place with local kids and we found out later that he was accused of a plethora of improprieties… We stayed involved until the site got big and the gaming kicked up, and then built up the framework of their sportsbook pages. About a year and a half later if I remember right the business actually moved to the Caribbean (even though they'd claimed that's where their offices were, there were in fact domestic until then) and our company stopped working for them.
A few years later I heard of numerous people I knew getting arrested when they returned on vacation to the United States and to a lesser extent Canada (which has less aggressive laws on double-taxation and foreign gambling), and that those who had the sense not to visit family and friends in their home countries were becoming permanent exiles. Then to make matters worse, many of the Caribbean and Central American banks that were being used by both the casinos and adult processors started randomly seizing assets for no good reason (as many of you may remember when BME was caught up in it when our processor stole $1.2 million from myself and some business partners — my share of that was luckily fractional).
About five years later I bumped into one of the owners of the casino company I'd helped create on the street (haggling over the price of a laptop computer that he wanted to buy with cash). Surprised to find him, I took him out to lunch to see what had happened since I'd last seen him. He'd made millions when the company went public (typical internet story!), and then millions more as the casino, then nearly a monopoly, started raking in increasingly large winnings… and then it started to go sour.
First he started having visa problems — local officials would show up at his door at random times, sometimes monthly, sometimes more often, and say things like “your visa has expired; we will need $10,000 in cash by the end of the week or you'll be thrown out of the country and your assets seized” — yeah, it's true that these were “tax haven” countries, but local officials were in with the banks, and knew exactly how much they could extort. To make matters worse, the private banks were “losing” increasingly large amounts of money. My impression was that they were assessing the profitability of the business, and then simply stealing whatever they thought they could take safely, like some sort of strange protection racket.
I'm sure at that point he must have been wondering why he didn't just stick with the far more profitable and legal businesses we'd first built for him, but then it all came to an end anyway… the bank “disappeared” something like three million dollars, and when asked where it was, basically answered with, “what three million dollars?”
I'm not even kidding. I guess they'd decided that due to the serious legal challenges, coupled with the stiff competition — all of the legal US casinos were on the edge of getting in on the games back then and everyone assumed the shady companies would die — they probably decided that the revenue stream was coming to an end and just looted what they could. So now he found himself owing insane amounts of taxes in numerous nations, facing criminal charges in America and Canada, and being virtual broke. He spent a while hopping through Eastern European countries trying to get things restarted, and then with the help of friends ended up in the Toronto area under a false identity. I'm told that he's back in the game, and some cursory net searches confirm that, but I haven't seen him since…
I guess it's one of those “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” stories. Everyone back then thought it was going to be easy money… How wrong they were…
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