1157
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120000 within 24h
(robindev.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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Yikes. That sounds bad.
Okay all my sympathy is gone. Online casinos deserve to die.
That said, my feelings towards economic vampires aside, the way the events unfolded is concerning to say the least. Cloudflare has been racking up evil-corp points quite rapidly in recent months.
As a person who works in server hosting (not as devops or IT), I'm often privy to customer interactions. I feel like my company does a really good job at damage control - where if we fuck up, some rep gets on the phone and makes things right. We've eaten costs on behalf of our customers.
But sometimes, you just gotta tell a customer to go fuck themselves.
And those customers, those biggest complainers are often in online gambling, crypto, adult content, or racist shit.
We get DDos'd a lot from it. But I'm glad the company I work for doesn't bow down to garbage companies.
I'm honestly not surprised.
I used to hook up with a guy who was 100% convinced that he could game the system. It had something to do with break frequencies from various services and certain time windows for playing. He won sometimes, but he obviously didn't talk much about his losses. He wasn't a very happy person, and I think gambling offered an easy release.
That's my big issue with gambling. It's a business preying on addicts leaving many in financial ruin, and overall they do nothing for society at large. Here in Sweden it is regulated, but you honestly don't notice it. There are so many internet casinos vanishing and cropping up on an almost daily basis. If you turn on the radio the adverts are like 40% online casinos, 40% sex toy sites, and 20% various services, like tyre shifting, glass repairs, etc.
A lot of those exploit EU rules on open markets to dodge proper local licensing (I'm also from Sweden)
That explains why they all seem so samey. E.g. online casinos never have any sort of physical presence like scratch cards or what have you, even though we have plenty of scratch cards.
No they don't, at least for Sweden. I remember when they regulated the market in Sweden (I was working for a gambling company at the time and I had to run the security & compliance for the Swedish license). There is no such thing as open market for gambling where the market is regulated (Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, not sure if Norway finally regulated).
As far as I know, a handful of companies got regulated at the first round, some failed and could not operate in Sweden (this might mean you actually need to deny access to users from Sweden - since you do KYC you know) for quite some time (before they eventually managed to get the license).
The problem (why the other user mentions all similar sites) is that the big companies (say Kindred group, Betsson) tend to spin up many alternative brands with different looks to attract different customers.
Also, most of the companies that operate in Scandinavia use the Maltese license, but that works only in unregulated markets (Finland, Iceland and Norway for example - unless something changed in the last 3 years). That said, getting a license once you have another is quite simple usually. The Swedish license for example is easier to get than and very similar to the Danish one, so if you operate in Denmark you can just fill in the paperwork and you should be easily able to pick that one up.