CyberThrill was one of the first

online casino Online casinos, also known as virtual casinos or Internet casinos, are online versions of traditional ("brick and mortar") casinos. Online casinos enable gamblers to play and wager on casino games through the Internet. It is a prolific form of ...

s. It gained notoriety for being one of the largest organised international sponsorship and gambling frauds through its

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program. Formed in 1997 and located in Nassau, Bahamas, the company was represented by the

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firm Internet Entertainment Enterprises, Inc. (based in

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) which also handled the casino's marketing and

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vertising program. The online casino was eventually taken offline some time in late 2000-early 2001 by disgruntled webmasters who had fallen victim to the scam. The former location of cyberThrill was CyberThrill.com, which is today an Ad driven parked domain.

History

1997–2000: Ad program

As one of the foremost methods of website revenue in the late 1990s,

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owners used to enroll in CyberThrill's ad serving program to display banners on their websites, similar to the contemporary

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program (by

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). CyberThrill ran the program to exclusively send gamblers to the casino website. The program itself was administered on a per-click basis. The reason behind CyberThrill's popularity were claims of above-average $0.20 per click-through. Many

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joined the program and brought traffic to the online casino, but very few got paid. CyberThrill occasionally would send out a small, first check ($5 or $10) to 'show' legitimacy to the program. However, once the user's account reached in excess of $50 to $100, the casino would withhold payment or simply terminated the contract with the webmaster, on claims that CyberThrill's terms were breached. Though

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was rampant (as has been the case with AdSense and other ad serving programs), many webmasters nonetheless earned their clicks fairly, but were still cheated by the casino.

2000–2001: Demise

The online casino was eventually destroyed some time in late 2000-early 2001 in an attack by webmasters who were scammed by the program. MungaBunga, owner of Hackology.co, created a

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program that registered millions of fake accounts into the CyberThrill database, overloaded the company's servers and prevented new members from registering. Other cheated webmasters participated in the attack.

References

{{Scams and confidence tricks Online gambling companies of the Bahamas Defunct casinos Defunct online companies Online advertising Internet fraud

History

1997–2000: Ad program

2000–2001: Demise

See also

References