For only the second time in our history we unpublished an article on Thursday 11th May. Readers can now note the contents as below:

After several of our employees were contacted by email with the opportunity to purchase various data sheets, some of which included all the players’ details with the exception of credit card numbers. One of the lists included more than 315,000 members of what maybe the biggest name in online bingo in the UK!!

There were more than 10 different lists of player’s data, including more than 2.5 million players. Four of the lists were from the top gaming companies in the UK. While we are not planning on revealing the names of the companies involved yet for legal reasons we did try to make contact with ********* as it had been claimed that one of their former directors had ‘swapped’ player details lists for one of their brands. They have made no attempt to contact us in relation to this matter

It should be noted that the individual in possession of all the lists claims not to be in the gaming industry. Most companies claim to only share information with carefully “selected 3rd parties”. This individual is attempting to sell the lists for around £2,000 each to anyone interested. The communication attempts were not made through Bingosupermarket and were made to the personal email addresses of two of our employees. Personally I was somewhat concerned where the individual had got personal details of the people from our company in the first place but the guy suggested he had obtained a list of affiliates and contacts from ‘a leading brand in the online gaming industry’. It seems that that this is pretty well organised.

Many people will have read the issues regarding the Sony incident in the last month and it will have no doubt seriously damaged their reputation. The information in these lists and the way it is being sold is even worse. Several years ago there was an incident involving T-Mobile staff selling the details of players that were near to the end of their contracts to brokers who then sold the details to the competition.

Let’s not forget that there are already higher levels of problem gambling associated with online gaming than at land based sites. The problems are only likely to escalate if player’s details are sold to anyone on the street. We have taken this matter seriously as to us these list do not look bogus and the contact details are real. This wasn’t a case of simply names and emails addresses being sold some of these lists included:

• Name

• Address

• Email Address

• Phone Number

• Date of Registration

• First Deposit

• Last Deposit

• Total Amount Deposited

• Balance of Account

• Balance of Bonus Account

• VIP Status

• Number of Deposits

• Amount Lost

• Revenue

• Biggest Win

• Where Referred From

In addition to the obvious breach in the data protection act this information allows companies to target specific individuals which may have an addiction to gambling.