Give your credit card to Virgin

GIVE YOUR MONEY TO BILLIONAIRE Richard Branson with Virgin Gaming, a site that loudly states you can sign up for free and win cash prizes fragging the competition, but you'll need to dig around to find the bit about having to hand over your credit card or Paypal details.

While registered players can play for free, to compete for those prizes will mean paying for access to those frag fests and the price could be as high as $1,000 but as low as $20. While Virgin has a promotion with free or $1 a pop tournaments from 15 June to 10 August, after that it could be high risk low reward in Branson's online arenas.

At E3 this week Virgin wanted to keep prospective losers minds off of the $1,000 entry fees and instead appeal to their intellects with an offer of a thumb massage "from the sexy Virgin Gaming Girls" and a chance to meet the "girl gamers of Frag Dolls". But if you can focus on the gaming instead and be lucky enough to win a prize, the notification of your funded victory will appear in your email inbox.

But fret not because Virgin Gaming will happily send you plenty of other emails. New players are automatically opted-in to receive promotional marketing e-mails, promotional partner e-mails, newsletters, fairness e-mails, whatever they are, tournament or game play related e-mails, and the slightly less fun financial e-mails. But they can be opted out of, according to Virgin.

Once the credit card details are given over the site has started with eight games including John Madden's NFL and Halo and a further four "coming soon". But fragging won't mean prizes if you're from Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Vermont, because what Virgin Gaming offers is not legal there.

But for those in the UK and the online gambling happy 36 states of the USA perhaps it will all go smoother than Virgin Gaming's countdown clock on its website. That reached zero at 0900h BST but nothing happened for six hours until after 1500h BST. One hopes its sister company Virgin Galactic, offering rocket powered flights to above 100km, has a better countdown experience for its spaceliner Space Ship Two. µ