14 DAY TRIAL // Online gambling gets another blow after Ultimate Bet (UB) suffered a data breach as a result of which around 3.5 million of their customers’ accounts were published online.
Full names, aliases, email addresses, phone numbers, account balances, IP addresses, deposit methods, birth dates, UB account numbers and statuses of the players were all posted on the Internet by an anonymous hacker, reports Subject:Poker.
One of the files even contains a column labeled “passwords,” but the data doesn’t seem to represent actual passwords.
For now, all the links that pointed to the massive quantity of information were removed, but while they were online, a large number of people had access to the files.
The leaked data was dumped organized by country and the numbers indicate that 2 million US citizens, 319,000 Canadians, 137,000 British and 1 million individuals from other countries were affected.
While a large part of the data is inconsistent and many unlabeled columns appear in the leak, the information seems to be accurate, which means that indeed someone managed to breach UB’s systems.
An interesting thing is that Ultimate Bet, along with Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and Poker Stars stopped their activity after their domains were seized by US authorities for money laundering suspicions.
The hacking operations, the fact that their customers can’t withdraw their winnings, and the legal issues that surround these businesses have really taken their toll, and from this perspective, their boat is about to sink for good.
Recently, the European Union has been debating the issue of online gambling since they noticed that things are getting out of hand. They are planning to make a legislation that will be followed by most of the countries who still allow any form of gambling, but since there are many states involved, it won’t be easy for them to reach an agreement.