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Internet Spades Site Spadester May be a Bad Bet

The Afflicter wasn’t very familiar with the card game called spades, so we were surprised to find in our research how many people were looking for a game of spades online.

There are 60,500 searches a month on the keywords “spades online,” according to estimates from research tools that Google offers. Another 18,100 are estimated to be searching the term “internet spades.”

So one would think that people who run Spadester.com should be able to do a good honest business, offering games of spades online. Especially with the opportunity to wager. (The site purports to be based in Cyprus.)

But many people who say they are former customers of Spadester.com are warning others away. There are discussion threads in numerous forums and posts in a number of blogs, going back for months, warning that Spadester is a scam.

Many of these warnings describe similar experiences with Spadester: Upon signing up, the customer plays some spades, wins a little and cashes out their winnings; Their initial experience gives them confidence that the site is not a scam.

They then play more aggressively, win and end up with hundreds or thousands of dollars in their account. But this time, when they request to cash out, Spadester is unresponsive, citing technical reasons for not being able to immediately make the payout.

Then Spadester tells the customer that they can have their money if they make a new deposit, of a couple hundred bucks or so, in the Spadester account.

Sometimes, Spadester staff become aggressive and threaten to close customers’ accounts and not pay them at all.

Customers who decline to make a new deposit may eventually be told that they can have their payout but they first must verify their identities by providing a Social Security number.

This last tactic has lead some to speculate that Spadester is not only ripping off its customers by refusing to pay winners, but that it also may be harvesting personal information to sell to identity thieves:

To see some of the discussions of this check out: World Law Direct, Rip-off Report and Scam.com.

Afflicter believes that there are some online gambling sites that are offering honest games, but we recommend that you should be very careful of who you’re dealing with if you gamble online.

In the offline gambling world, casino operators are heavily regulated. In major gambling destinations like Nevada and Atlantic City, N.J., casino operators who cheat run the risk of losing their operating licenses or being charged by regulators with heavy fines.

But on the Internet, a casino operator may be very hard to find or identify, and may not bear any consequence for cheating.

You should also be skeptical of reviews you read of gambling sites. Many of them are likely to be posted by affiliate marketers who earn commissions for bringing new gamblers. We suspect for example that it was an affiliate marketer who posted this: