Bodog Fires UK Employees – Could Online Bingo Follow Suit?
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Have you heard of the massive online casino giants that are Bodog? Established by Calvin Ayre way back in 1994, Bodog is the Godfather of all online gaming companies, paving the way for other online casinos, online poker and even online bingo sites who strived to have a reputation as established as Bodog – they even have their own brand of coffee!
As celebrated as Bodog are, they have been at the centre of a media storm recently after they were “forced” to fire a whopping 70 employees of the UK operations. Though the online gaming industry rumour mill has spun off the chart and many wild theories and conspiracies have been churned out to explain this sudden job cull, Bodog insist that this redundancy is due to “restructuring”. The company issued a statement on their website claiming: "In the UK we have undertaken a long period of market analysis and we are now starting to adapt our product to fall in line with those findings. We feel we now have a better understanding of what the UK customer wants and the focus is now on re-structuring our business to be better placed to put that information into practice."
This may come as no surprise to those of you who keep up to date with the online casino news. Just last month it was reported that the Bodog.com was actually seized by federal prosecutors for “operating an illegal gambling business and conspiring to commit money laundering” and founder, Calvin Ayre, was indicted. We then saw a Costa Rican company that had been working with Bodog forced to close its doors. Could the indictment controversy have had a domino effect on the once great Bodog enterprise?
Or is the world of online casinos and indeed online gaming as whole suffering as a result of the likes of the recession and inflation? Could online bingo be going the same way? The fact that such drastic measures appear to have directly resulted from the indictment controversy could mean that other operations like online bingo will not be effected. The one comfort that we online bingo fans can take from this apparent online gaming decline is that online bingo continues to be THE most prosperous branch of online gaming to date – where there are hordes of bingo fans (over 100 million worldwide) willing to splash cash on their favourite bingo games, there is surely no chance of decline!




