Practically all casinos on the Internet are spending sustainable sums of money on anti-hacking software in order to secure their assets and ensure corporate security, that’s why it’s almost impossible to hack into a casino.
Hacking is not the only existing illegal way to increase your income. Additionally, fraudsters try to get access to users´ accounts by guessing their passwords in order to benefit from their bank accounts. At times, criminals try to crack md5 algorithms used in casino data enciphering.
How to Avoid Becoming a Gambling Addict. Ah, the meat and potatoes of the matter. There are steps you can take to avoid becoming an addict, but if you choose to gamble at all, you’re drastically increasing your odds of becoming addicted. Don’t start gambling to begin with if you have a family or personal history of addiction. How to avoid gambling addiction at an online casino Online Casinos are very popular at the moment because you can gamble at any moment and at any place. You only need a computer, tablet or mobile device with an internet connection and you are able to play online casino games. Lesson: Gambling—Why It's Wrong and How to Stop. This lesson addresses two issues—gambling and addiction to gambling. It also relates those issues to your relationships with God and the people you love. Online gambling fraud is a little different due to the very nature of the online environment. The anonymity of the internet and the way in which online gambling is structured and regulated leaves plenty of room for both sides to employ a wide variety of underhanded tactics. Unsurprisingly, both players and online casinos want to protect themselves. The player visits a casino even if it damages his career. Needless to say that the problem of gambling addiction is much easier to prevent than to get rid of. So listen to our advices and it will not let gambling ruin your life. Tips on how to avoid gambling addiction.
Casino hacking programs
If you had ever tried looking for casino hacking programs on the Internet, you would have probably noticed hundreds of them. Those who offer such programs promise either to hack into a casino or at least to help you win in one of the games offered by the said casino (for instance, roulette).
In fact, programs that can really hack into a casino are rare to find, so the majority of online offers of this kind are simply malicious programs, viruses or different hacks and cracks aimed at fishing your personal data and information about accounts.
Among the most widespread types of casino hacking programs you may find those trying to guess passwords and get the access to personal accounts of other gamblers. Although such programs (frequently called ¨password sorters¨) are technically advanced, it takes them a long time to finally guess the right password. In order to obtain online casino data (logins and passwords to accounts) “password sorters” have to look through thousands of symbols (letters and figures) and combinations, which is definitely a time-consuming process.
Another type of programs, like the most well-known one called SpyNet, is aimed at casino hacking by the means of traffic interception. Such programs are famous for their ability to track traffic transferred to certain online casino addresses and store it on users’ personal computers. Among wiretapped data, fraudsters might find users’ personal data, the exact time of web page entry, time spent on gambling, types of games played and, most importantly, logins and passwords to gamblers’ accounts.
Clients’ data and financial security
How To Resist Gambling Urge
Online casino gaming providers are not responsible for ensuring security of transactions (such as adding funds or money withdrawals) carried out between gamblers and casinos. This is predominantly the responsibility of gambling websites. Particularly gambling web sites should guarantee security of your transactions and personal data. That’s why security is a matter of paramount importance for gambling resources, thus all transactions are secured by 256-bit enciphering.
In terms of security, website administrators might ask you to fill in a registration form indicating data, which is usually not announced publically. Sometimes users are asked to provide their passport scan copies, driving license copies or even scanned receipts of payments for utility services. Actually, all of these are not stored permanently and after verification they are automatically deleted. Don’t worry about such precautions; the data is collected for the sake of your own security: if provided data doesn’t coincide with information indicated in the payment system, transactions are automatically frozen and declined. Casinos treat seriously everything connected with security and financial matters.
How to avoid hacking: 4 rules
- Hacking into platforms containing data. In order to protect yourself from this very type of hacking, place your information on the websites based on complex programming languages, as well as those with servers having no internal network access. Additional user authentication is another advantage of the security system.
Read also: How to choose safe online casino software - Password breaking. A widespread method of breaking your password is using a special casino hacking script developed to read in keyboard typed information and pass it to fraudsters. The more complex the password is, the harder it gets for a script to decipher it. If the password consists of uppercast and lowercase symbols and digital characters, hackers will find it difficult to gain possession of your information.
- PC insecurity. Absence of sufficient anti-virus protection, necessary updates, or simply pirated software might be the cause of gamblers’ identity theft. To protect your data use security firewalls and install necessary updates from the official webpage of your provider.
- SSL protocol is an essential tool securing your webpage. SSL protocols ensure secure connection between servers and users’ browsers. All the information is transferred through HTTPS in a form of an enciphered code. It gets way harder to steal information, as long as information can be deciphered only by using a special key.
When Shirley was in her mid-20s she and some friends road-tripped to Las Vegas on a lark. That was the first time she gambled. Around a decade later, while working as an attorney on the East Coast, she would occasionally sojourn in Atlantic City. By her late 40s, however, she was skipping work four times a week to visit newly opened casinos in Connecticut. She played blackjack almost exclusively, often risking thousands of dollars each round—then scrounging under her car seat for 35 cents to pay the toll on the way home. Ultimately, Shirley bet every dime she earned and maxed out multiple credit cards. “I wanted to gamble all the time,” she says. “I loved it—I loved that high I felt.”
In 2001 the law intervened. Shirley was convicted of stealing a great deal of money from her clients and spent two years in prison. Along the way she started attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings, seeing a therapist and remaking her life. “I realized I had become addicted,” she says. “It took me a long time to say I was an addict, but I was, just like any other.”
Ten years ago the idea that someone could become addicted to a habit like gambling the way a person gets hooked on a drug was controversial. Back then, Shirley's counselors never told her she was an addict; she decided that for herself. Now researchers agree that in some cases gambling is a true addiction.
In the past, the psychiatric community generally regarded pathological gambling as more of a compulsion than an addiction—a behavior primarily motivated by the need to relieve anxiety rather than a craving for intense pleasure. In the 1980s, while updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) officially classified pathological gambling as an impulse-control disorder—a fuzzy label for a group of somewhat related illnesses that, at the time, included kleptomania, pyromania and trichotillomania (hairpulling). In what has come to be regarded as a landmark decision, the association moved pathological gambling to the addictions chapter in the manual's latest edition, the DSM-5, published this past May. The decision, which followed 15 years of deliberation, reflects a new understanding of the biology underlying addiction and has already changed the way psychiatrists help people who cannot stop gambling.
How To Resist Gambling Urges
More effective treatment is increasingly necessary because gambling is more acceptable and accessible than ever before. Four in five Americans say they have gambled at least once in their lives. With the exception of Hawaii and Utah, every state in the country offers some form of legalized gambling. And today you do not even need to leave your house to gamble—all you need is an Internet connection or a phone. Various surveys have determined that around two million people in the U.S. are addicted to gambling, and for as many as 20 million citizens the habit seriously interferes with work and social life.
Two of a Kind
The APA based its decision on numerous recent studies in psychology, neuroscience and genetics demonstrating that gambling and drug addiction are far more similar than previously realized. Research in the past two decades has dramatically improved neuroscientists' working model of how the brain changes as an addiction develops. In the middle of our cranium, a series of circuits known as the reward system links various scattered brain regions involved in memory, movement, pleasure and motivation. When we engage in an activity that keeps us alive or helps us pass on our genes, neurons in the reward system squirt out a chemical messenger called dopamine, giving us a little wave of satisfaction and encouraging us to make a habit of enjoying hearty meals and romps in the sack. When stimulated by amphetamine, cocaine or other addictive drugs, the reward system disperses up to 10 times more dopamine than usual.
Continuous use of such drugs robs them of their power to induce euphoria. Addictive substances keep the brain so awash in dopamine that it eventually adapts by producing less of the molecule and becoming less responsive to its effects. As a consequence, addicts build up a tolerance to a drug, needing larger and larger amounts to get high. In severe addiction, people also go through withdrawal—they feel physically ill, cannot sleep and shake uncontrollably—if their brain is deprived of a dopamine-stimulating substance for too long. At the same time, neural pathways connecting the reward circuit to the prefrontal cortex weaken. Resting just above and behind the eyes, the prefrontal cortex helps people tame impulses. In other words, the more an addict uses a drug, the harder it becomes to stop.
Research to date shows that pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same genetic predispositions for impulsivity and reward seeking. Just as substance addicts require increasingly strong hits to get high, compulsive gamblers pursue ever riskier ventures. Likewise, both drug addicts and problem gamblers endure symptoms of withdrawal when separated from the chemical or thrill they desire. And a few studies suggest that some people are especially vulnerable to both drug addiction and compulsive gambling because their reward circuitry is inherently underactive—which may partially explain why they seek big thrills in the first place.
Even more compelling, neuroscientists have learned that drugs and gambling alter many of the same brain circuits in similar ways. These insights come from studies of blood flow and electrical activity in people's brains as they complete various tasks on computers that either mimic casino games or test their impulse control. In some experiments, virtual cards selected from different decks earn or lose a player money; other tasks challenge someone to respond quickly to certain images that flash on a screen but not to react to others.
A 2005 German study using such a card game suggests problem gamblers—like drug addicts—have lost sensitivity to their high: when winning, subjects had lower than typical electrical activity in a key region of the brain's reward system. In a 2003 study at Yale University and a 2012 study at the University of Amsterdam, pathological gamblers taking tests that measured their impulsivity had unusually low levels of electrical activity in prefrontal brain regions that help people assess risks and suppress instincts. Drug addicts also often have a listless prefrontal cortex.
Further evidence that gambling and drugs change the brain in similar ways surfaced in an unexpected group of people: those with the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson's disease. Characterized by muscle stiffness and tremors, Parkinson's is caused by the death of dopamine-producing neurons in a section of the midbrain. Over the decades researchers noticed that a remarkably high number of Parkinson's patients—between 2 and 7 percent—are compulsive gamblers. Treatment for one disorder most likely contributes to another. To ease symptoms of Parkinson's, some patients take levodopa and other drugs that increase dopamine levels. Researchers think that in some cases the resulting chemical influx modifies the brain in a way that makes risks and rewards—say, those in a game of poker—more appealing and rash decisions more difficult to resist.
A new understanding of compulsive gambling has also helped scientists redefine addiction itself. Whereas experts used to think of addiction as dependency on a chemical, they now define it as repeatedly pursuing a rewarding experience despite serious repercussions. That experience could be the high of cocaine or heroin or the thrill of doubling one's money at the casino. “The past idea was that you need to ingest a drug that changes neurochemistry in the brain to get addicted, but we now know that just about anything we do alters the brain,” says Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist and addiction expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It makes sense that some highly rewarding behaviors, like gambling, can cause dramatic [physical] changes, too.”
Gaming the System
How To Resist Gambling
Redefining compulsive gambling as an addiction is not mere semantics: therapists have already found that pathological gamblers respond much better to medication and therapy typically used for addictions rather than strategies for taming compulsions such as trichotillomania. For reasons that remain unclear, certain antidepressants alleviate the symptoms of some impulse-control disorders; they have never worked as well for pathological gambling, however. Medications used to treat substance addictions have proved much more effective. Opioid antagonists, such as naltrexone, indirectly inhibit brain cells from producing dopamine, thereby reducing cravings.
Dozens of studies confirm that another effective treatment for addiction is cognitive-behavior therapy, which teaches people to resist unwanted thoughts and habits. Gambling addicts may, for example, learn to confront irrational beliefs, namely the notion that a string of losses or a near miss—such as two out of three cherries on a slot machine—signals an imminent win.
Unfortunately, researchers estimate that more than 80 percent of gambling addicts never seek treatment in the first place. And of those who do, up to 75 percent return to the gaming halls, making prevention all the more important. Around the U.S.—particularly in California—casinos are taking gambling addiction seriously. Marc Lefkowitz of the California Council on Problem Gambling regularly trains casino managers and employees to keep an eye out for worrisome trends, such as customers who spend increasing amounts of time and money gambling. He urges casinos to give gamblers the option to voluntarily ban themselves and to prominently display brochures about Gamblers Anonymous and other treatment options near ATM machines and pay phones. A gambling addict may be a huge source of revenue for a casino at first, but many end up owing massive debts they cannot pay.
Shirley, now 60, currently works as a peer counselor in a treatment program for gambling addicts. “I'm not against gambling,” she says. “For most people it's expensive entertainment. But for some people it's a dangerous product. I want people to understand that you really can get addicted. I'd like to see every casino out there take responsibility.”