CyberThrill
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CyberThrill was one of the first online casinos, which gained its notoriety for being one of the largest organized international sponsorship (and gambling) frauds, through its ad serving program. Formed in 1997 and located in Nassau, Bahamas, the company was represented by the Canadian firm Internet Entertainment Enterprises, Inc. (based in Montreal, Canada) which also handled the casino's marketing and banner advertising program. The on-line casino was eventually taken off-line some time in late 2000-early 2001 by disgruntled web masters who had fallen victims to the scam. The former web address of CyberThrill was CyberThrill.com, which is today an ad-driven parked domain.
History
Ad program
As one of the foremost methods of website revenue in the late 1990s, website owners used to enroll in CyberThrill's ad serving program to display banners on their websites, similar to the contemporary AdSense program (by Google). CyberThrill ran the program to exclusively send gamblers to the casino website. The program itself was administered on a per-click basis.
The reason behind CyberThrill's popularity were claims of above-average $0.20 per click-through. Many webmasters joined 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 the CyberThrill's terms were breached.
Though click fraud was 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.
End
The online casino was eventually destroyed some time in late 2000-early 2001 in an attack by webmasters who were scammed by the program. Webmasters created a Javascript program that registered millions of fake accounts into the CyberThrill database, forcing the company’s servers to become overloaded and preventing new members from registering.