Blacklisted Casinos

The online gambling industry is rife with scams, sites out to take your money or your financial details. It is a minefield, and even the ones who aren’t forward in stealing your money, can refuse withdrawals, ban you for no reason and even disappear overnight, taking your money and details with them.

In this article we will try and help you to avoid these sites by listing some of the biggest offenders of the last few years. By knowing about these sites and by learning why they have been blacklisted, you should also be able to avoid sites like them, because there will be more.

Casinos to Try

Before we get to the casinos that you should stay well away from, just which casinos should you join? There are plenty out there, but not all of them offer big bonuses, good customer service or worthwhile loyalty schemes. A casino that has always ticked the boxes for us is Royal Vegas Casino. This is available more or less everywhere, but players in the US are unable to signup, whilst players in the UK (due to recent law changes) will have to sign-up to a sister site, which they will be redirected to.

Royal Vegas Casino has a huge new member bonus, a fantastic loyalty scheme and unbeatable customer support. It also has some great games, utilizing the Microgaming software, which is often considered to be the best casino software on the market, providing diehard gamblers with a long list of slots and table games.

The Casino Blacklist

There are many ways that casinos can make this list, as alluded to in the beginning of this article. One of the biggest offenders, and one that often goes unnoticed, is casinos that have software which is not as fair as it professes to be. If you’re playing on a game that offers you a 50/50 chance, you’ll be very disappointed if it actually turns out that your chances are as little as 20/80 in favor of the house.

That was the way of things with the Spielo G2, which was used on the BetFred casino software. BetFred was a very respected bookmakers prior to this. They had been a mainstay in the UK and European betting markets for a number of years, but when a user discovered that their software was rigged, they lost a lot of that respect. BetFred were very apologetic and they stopped using Spielo G2 as soon as the report became official and as soon as people started to complain in large numbers, but the fact that it went unnoticed for so long was enough for many to blacklist BetFred. The fact that they didn’t refund customers who had lost money on this software was also disappointing and didn’t help matters.

Whilst Spielo G2 is not used on BetFred any longer, it is used elsewhere and has been reported on casinos such as Barona. If you find an online casino that uses it, then you should probably go elsewhere. SkillonNet have also been blacklisted by many sites thanks to a “gamble” feature that offered players a 50/50 chance to double their money, only for the actual odds to be heavily weighted in the casino’s favor.

A site that has made it onto everyone’s blacklist recently is Mission2Game Casino, which uses the Soft Magic Dice software. Simply put, this software is either intentionally flawed or very badly made. There are reports that it didn’t pay out straights in video poker (even though the player was showing a straight) and that it has ignored Wild symbols and jackpots in slot machine games.

The most alarming thing to come out about this casino though is the way they responded to complaints made against them and their software. Not only did they show a complete lack of understanding about the most basic rules in their games, but their responses were poorly worded, full of spelling errors and bordering on the rude and ridiculous. There are also some very strongly worded policies in their privacy policy that customers should be wary of, including one that says they will release the private information of players if they deem they have been cheating, despite claiming that they will never do this in another area of their privacy policy.

Whilst some of the sites mentioned above may actually be legit and have just made some very big and costly mistakes (certainly in the case of BetFred) it seems that Mission2Game Casino displays all of the warning signs and that this casino has no intention of being legitimate and playing things by the book. Other sites that you should avoid include the poker site Lock Poker, which stopped paying players their withdrawals but continued to accept deposits and new memberships, and Moore Games, which has been blacklisted by a number of sites and communities for a couple of years now.