Richard Branson’s Virgin Group Sets Up Online Casino in N.J.
Richard Branson, wearing an interesting hat. (Getty)
Finally, you can go to Atlantic City and not actually have to leave your hotel room.
The Virgin Group—founded by everyone's favorite British kajillionaire, Richard Branson—has partnered with Gamesys to open Virgin Casino, a new, legal online gambling site for people in the Garden State.
(In case you haven't been avidly following New Jersey's virtual casino news, online gambling was legalized in the state last November.)
Though online gambling (or, at least, legal online gambling) has been off to a pretty slow start in New Jersey, Gamesys COO Lee Fenton seemed pretty sure that people are going to (virtually) flock to Virgin's new online enterprise.
"There's a lot of games on there that are tried and trusted from the casino floor, but there's also a load of unique content—slot content or jackpot content that you can't find in any brick-and-mortar casino," Gamesys COO Lee Fenton told Betabeat.
True to Virgin's c-c-craaaaaazy reputation, the Virgin Casino will apparently be giving out a butt ton of money. With a much-hyped communal jackpot feature, any time a user wins $10,000, another $10,000 will be split amongst all the other users currently logged into the site—and Mr. Fenton said we can expect the jackpots' values to get even higher in the future.
And more good, #relevant news: Mr. Fenton assured us that users won't have to worry about their personal data being leaked to some sketchy Russian mafia peeps.
"We're certainly not worried about data leaks," he said. "All of our technology is state of the art....We look at multiple different databases to verify the player is who they say they are, and make sure that they are of a legal age, and make sure the player is physically in New Jersey when they wager." Cool.
