Israel rules against internet gambling

Judge Abraham Heiman has ruled that Victor Chandler has violated laws banning the advertisement of illegal gambling. According to Judge Heiman, a company cannot use as an excuse the fact that their website and their servers are located outside of the country, to promote gambling online. He has ordered to the company to block all access to the website from Israeli visitors. He continues, that in the era of Internet, the laws should be reversed - meaning that what matters is where the end user (the player at the casino) is located, and not the providers of the services themselves.

Victor Chandler is the name of an online gambling company which has a page in Hebrew. A couple of weeks back, the CEO of the company, Michael Carlton, was detained in Israel for questioning, and the ruling is the result of it. According to Heiman, the presence of a Hebrew language on the gambling website, along with the fact that people could bet on sports teams from Israel was enough to indicate that the online gambling website was targeting citizen of the country, therefore the site is obligated to block all Israeli traffic.