Geo-location firm debunks Beckwith claims
News on 23 May 2015
News on 23 May 2015
The ill-informed claims last week by Lyle Beckwith of the National Association of Convenience Stores that geo-location is not effective in intrastate online gambling situations has been debunked by Anna Sainsbury, chief executive officer of GeoComply.
Beckwith made the claims in an op-ed article in the Washington DC publication Roll Call in what appeared to be an attempt to prevent the sale of lottery tickets online, an eventuality that could impact retail sales by his Association’s members.
The NACS executive alleged that it is easy for people outside legal gaming jurisdictions to fake their locations and gamble from outside a state that has legalised.
In answering his claims, Sainsbury deployed the proven fact that in legalised states like New Jersey, Delaware and Nevada there is more than enough hard empirical evidence to show that today’s sophisticated geo-location technology is highly effective on a continuing basis.
However, Sainsbury did concede that spoofing one’s location on the internet was possible, but added that legalised jurisdictions, contrary to Beckwith’s article, take this into account in the formulation of technical regulations.
“As a licensed geolocation provider in these three states, I can assure you that, in fact, these regulators literally ran thousands and thousands of tests outside of their own states’ boundaries, attempting to use all the spoofing techniques alluded to by Beckwith (and many more) in order to ensure the location results we provide are the correct ones and that their neighbors’ sovereignty over gaming was respected,” Sainsbury wrote in her response.
“Indeed, the regulators sent letters to their colleagues in neighboring states setting out the measures to ensure proper geo-location and inviting them to audit for themselves the sufficiency of the safeguards.
“Moreover, three leading independent gaming test laboratories (GLI, BMM and NMi) all were retained to conduct their own tests of our solution to ensure compliance and safety.”
Sainsbury revealed that her company carries out around five million geo-location checks every month in the three legalised states, determining individual locations to within a matter of yards (metres) to ensure that players are located within a state’s boundaries.
