Prince Albert bingo hall targeted by porn hack

By Glenn Hicks

A bingo hall in Prince Albert was caught with its pants down Monday night while patrons got a lot more than they expected.

One of the TV monitors at Carnival Bingo suddenly started showing a pornographic video. The red-faced incident, which is being blamed on a security hack, was filmed by a patron on their mobile phone and shared to Facebook where it has been viewed extensively.

“We had some new technology installed in the building and had a bit of a security breach with that technology,” Manager Todd Bernier told paNOW. “We’ve since had that corrected.”

He was unable to say for how long the offending video played but at least one Facebook post showed the graphic images on screen while several people were in the room.

Bernier said the matter had been reported to police and it was not immediately clear how it happened although he added “We have someone working on that.”

The business allows minors through its doors, although Bernier did not know of any children being exposed to the video.

“Not that I’m aware of, but certainly they could have been,” he said. Bernier added fortunately only one of their TV monitors showed the video.

He said they had received several phone calls Tuesday about the matter, but “everyone’s been very understanding about the incident.”

One of the patrons who shared video of the incident, Anna Merasty, saw the funny side of things.

“I saw some woman in front of me laughing and I started to look around to see what the commotion was about and I looked at the TV and that’s when I started filming,” she told paNOW. “My sister later won bingo so you can say she got lucky twice.”