PlayNow.com, British Columbia’s first foray into a state run online casino, is still offline today, nearly a week after an opening day glitch in their system compromised player's real money accounts and personal information.

The problem, originally reported by British Columbia Lottery Corporation officials as little more than a bug due to large amounts of traffic on the new site, was restated recently in a press release as a much more serious “data crossover” issue, that affected at least 134 players including 12 who had at least some amount of sensitive personal data exposed. 

A “data crossover” is a situation where for one reason or another- in this case apparently due to an overloaded system- one person’s account is switched onto another’s- much like when you make a cell phone call and besides talking to your mom in Madison, you’re suddenly conversing with some guy from Culver City.  In this case though, when the “data crossover” happened, many players could not only see other player’s accounts, but they were actually able to wager with them.

Before lottery officials were forced to come clean with the whole story of what went wrong launch day to turn “PlayNow” into “HopefullyPlayLater,” the site was expected to be up and running again anytime soon, but now with the severity of their issues fully realized and out in the open, the site is expected to be down until officials have not only fully resolved the problems, but have brought in third party regulators to approve and certify their solutions to them.

PlayNow.com, is just one of the first of many new government experiments involving online gambling in one form or another; those eager for full government regulation and the onslaught of regulated intrastate gambling sites, had best hope this British Columbia example proves to be more of an exception, and not the rule.