It’s Saturday, May 29, 2010 and I’ve been asked to write a review of Vegas Red Casino
Other than what I’ve seen on TV, I know next to nothing about casinos, gambling and on-line gambling. Being clueless about a topic doesn’t seem to hinder a lot of folks in the blogosphere, but I do try (and I think successfully) to limit my ramblings to topics I know at least enough about to have formed a rational opinion.
So, how to approach an assignment like this?
Yeah, but that’s boring. Gad, a Google search for the outfit I’m writing about (“Vegas Red Casino”) yields a bazillion results. So we refine our search to include “review.”
This still returned a daunting number of results, but one thing I noticed is that NONE were sponsored links. Remember, we talked about this sort of thing back on April 22, 2010. The absence of sponsored links suggests that the Vegas Red outfit is content with letting search engines find them based on what I call “natural crawlings.”
As with anything where money is changing hands on the Internet, I change the search to look for “scam.”
Okay, so here’s where we need to be a little skeptical. First, a LOT of stuff here is undated. In my first result of searching ‘“Vegas Red Casino” scam’ I get a review/ranking site that has them in the Top Ten in the two listed categories. This posting isn’t dated. Are these results as of yesterday or three years ago?
Plus, most of the results list on-line casinos that are NOT scams. Vegas Red makes this list a lot it seems. In our search, we change “scam” to “fraud.”
This is maddening. I’m trying to find out if Vegas Red Casino is a bad thing and get articles about online gambling sites having to deal with credit card fraud. And again, a lot of undated stuff.
I’m thinking that if this was a scam, it’d pop hard on Google search as such. For instance, do a search for “HomeworkMadeEZ scam.” If that many people are yelling about it, it’s probably something to avoid. So much for research. We’ll proceed under the assumption that it’s legit. Off to their website.
Oops! To play any of their games, you have to download and install their software. As someone who’s made a few bucks cleansing spyware, malware, bots and viruses from the computers of people who are incautious, I need to set a few things up first.
If you’re going to install something you’re not sure of, no wait… If you’re installing any new software of ANY kind, do yourself a huge favor and create a restore point. If I’m charging you $75 an hour to get rid of garbage, going back to a restore point is the FIRST thing I’m going to try.
Next, we go through and make sure I’ve got no credit card or other useful info stored on the test box. This goes for everyone who has an account on the computer in question. Dump cache, dump cookies, dump history and a couple more tasks I won’t go into. Off we go.
This is one of my grand gripes. Don’t assume everyone is going to see the same prompt or get the same dialog when providing instructions.
I can’t tell you the number of times a tech support call has gone longer than it should because I tell the caller to click on an option that they don’t see. A lot of times it’s because they’re not looking, but in this case, I don’t have the option to “RUN.” Anyway we download the file and run it.
In reading the terms and conditions, (yes, I read it) I’m pretty much not interested in going forward with this, meaning I’m not gonna be signing up, sorry. But let’s see what happens from here.
The software installed without error and ran. I see that you can play for money or for fun. Okay, we’ll play for fun. Uh oh….
Sorry, but if I’m just playing for fun, I don’t see a legitimate need for them to have my phone number and my email address. Why or earth would these people need to call me and I damn sure don’t want to get email from them or anyone they’d provide my email info to. A lot of people would enter false info here and some would go so far as to put in the phone number and address of the FBI or attorney general for their state. No, I wanted to give a legit review, but I know of no good reason to provide my phone number or email address. So, no thanks.
Notice the complete absence of an “Exit” or “Close” or “Back” button. Also notice that this thing takes up the whole screen. I can’t resize it. I can however hit my “start” button, get my task bar back and kill it from there.
Or can I? Right-clicking on its task bar icon takes me back to the full screen. There’s no “Close” dialog. Clever, very clever. I guess if I visited your casino in person, you’d lock the door behind me? Now I’,m all irritated. A little Process Explorer action and you’re all done.
And now we watch WireShark for a bit to see if this thing does anything untoward.
Nope, no attempts to phone home and in examining the list of new and changed files, the installer and subsequent program didn’t appear to write to anything it shouldn’t have. It didn’t seem to add any listening ports either, but that wouldn’t have done anything because of the firewall.
Uninstalling was painless without those annoying “Tell us why…” dialogs. It even got rid of its install directory. But just to be sure, we pop back to the restore point created just before this exercise.
So, I don’t know much of anything more about on-line gambling. I guess if you’re willing to share personal info with strangers, be my guest. If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, here’s some links for you.
Video: Card Counting Secrets
Online Casino Software
Vegas Bellagio Hotel
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