- A website on 800,000 Maryland license plates redirects to the ‘Philippines’ Best Betting Site.’
- The plates commemorated the War of 1812, but a non-profit lost control of the URL on the plate.
- Maryland officials now have to fix plates that unintentionally promote online gambling.
Nearly 800,000 vehicles in Maryland are unintentionally displaying an ad for online casinos and virtual cockfighting in the Philippines, thanks to a URL that appears on their license plates.
The plates, meant to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812, feature an illustration of Fort McHenry and the web address www.starspangled200.org along the bottom. However, the URL now redirects to a Philippines-based gambling website called Globe International.
There are 798,000 active War of 1812 license plates in the state, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration told Insider. The commemorative plates were the default for all license plates issued in Maryland between 2010 to 2016.
“The website printed on the plates is not owned by the Motor Vehicle Administration,” John Lazarou, spokesperson for Maryland’s Motor Vehicle, said in an emailed statement. The plates were meant to raise funds for bicentennial projects and events through the nonprofit Star Spangled 200, Inc. However, the group no longer controls the website.
Lazarou said that the agency’s IT department is looking into potential solutions. One option could be that the state purchases the domain name, but it’s not clear how much that would cost.
Internet archives show the website contained information about the Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail as recently as August 2022 before switching to promote the online casino at some point in December. Domain registration information shows that the ownership of the site was updated in mid-November.
The current site recommends various gambling sites in the Philippines, as well as walking readers through how to wager on “Sabong: The Filipino Cockfighting Style You Haven’t Tried.”
The current owner of www.starspangled200.org could not be reached — its Contact Us page currently returns a 403 error, blocking all traffic from the United States.
Reddit user Samuel Zehr first noticed that the URL led to a gambling website after typing it into his phone on Memorial Day. “The gambling website was not at all what I was expecting,” Zehr told The Washington Post.
Zehr posted about the discovery on Reddit, bringing the issue to the public’s attention. “I do feel really bad for the state employees who have to deal with this,” he told the Post.
The MVA “does not endorse the views or content on the current website using that URL,” Lazarou said.
In the meantime, Maryland must determine how to fix license plates that have become ads for “Philippines’ Best Betting Site” — and fast, before more potential customers hit the road.
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