David Briggs and GeoComply’s geolocation compliance technology featured in today’s New York Post article on online sportsbetting.
By John Crudele
I had a fascinating chat the other day with a company called GeoComply that’s based in Vancouver.
If you are into online sports or casino betting, you already know that you have to be physically situated in a location where the gambling is legal to place an online bet.
For instance, if you want to bet on the Super Bowl (uh, I mean The Big Game) and you live in New York, you have to drive or take a train to Jersey before you hit the button for a bet.
Well, GeoComply is the company that monitors for the casinos and online-bet takers where your cell phone or computer is located when you are trying to place that wager. Not in NJ? Your bet will be rejected.
And if you look at the company’s monitor, as I did, you can see electronic pins that represent each person trying to bet. Red pins in Manhattan, for instance, mean the bet has been declined.
This is not something that the average person can see. GeoComply, the biggest in its industry, is the hidden policeman for the gaming industry.
Blue pins represent people betting legally on iPhones in Jersey. Blue represents legal PC bets, and green is for Androids.
David Briggs, chief executive of GeoComply, says his company uses GPS locators and Wi-Fi triangulation to determine where people are when they are trying to bet.
In other words, the company’s equipment can establish not only which cell phone towers a bettor is bouncing off but also what Wi-Fi connections are within the bettor’s range.
Now that you know how it’s done, here is a bit of news: 44 percent of all the players who come into Jersey to bet come from within two miles of the border. So while New Jersey won’t necessarily lose all of those bettors once New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania ultimately legalize this sort of gambling, it is going to take a bite out of the Garden State’s business.
This week, the New York State Gaming Commission took its first step toward legalizing sports betting, so that bite is coming.
