CyberThrill

CyberThrillwas one of the firstonline casinos.It gained notoriety for being one of the largest organised international sponsorship and gambling frauds through itsad servingprogram. Formed in 1997 and located inNassau, Bahamas,the company was represented by theCanadianfirm Internet Entertainment Enterprises, Inc. (based inMontreal, Quebec,Canada) which also handled the casino's marketing andbanner advertisingprogram.

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, 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,websiteowners used to enroll in CyberThrill's ad serving program to display banners on their websites, similar to the contemporaryAdSenseprogram (byGoogle). CyberThrill ran the program to exclusively send gamblers to the casino website. The program itself was administered on aper-clickbasis.

The reason behind CyberThrill's popularity were claims of above-average $0.20 per click-through. Manywebmastersjoined 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.

Thoughclick fraudwas 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 aJavaScriptprogram 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.

See also

• AdSense