6 Online Casino Scams Bettors Need to Watch Out For

Like everything on the internet, the rumors of online casino scams are greatly exaggerated. But do they exist?

Yes, they do. We’ve identified several scams, scandals, and dirty tricks that should keep us all on our toes. We’ve also uncovered ways and means to protect us, including how they work and how you can protect yourself, and you could save us money and time.

Some got their start in the real world, and the danger of Las Vegas casino scams is that the perpetrators have had a testing ground with more guards and protections arrayed. For scammers, if you can make it work in Vegas, you can make it work anywhere.

This blog covers all of those scams tested in the real world and those borne in the Internet Age. Even better, we’ll provide some simple actions and safeguards you can implement to protect yourself, your computer, and your bank account. Forewarned is forearmed.

If you’re skeptical about a particular online casino, check our blacklisted casinos list to make sure that operation isn’t already identified as a shady racket.

Any time there’s money involved—and always is—there’s the opportunity for chicanery and theft. These tend to be related to deposits in the online casino jungle —particularly first deposits.

The “online casino” perpetrating this scam isn’t concerned about developing a long-term relationship with you. It’s more like a mugging, and the casinos will almost certainly not exist once it has your money.

In the early days of online gambling—let’s call the ‘90s and early 2000s—this theft was a real scandal. It’s also the sort of scam that doesn’t require a large investment of time or money on the part of the scammers.

Longer versions of the deposit theft game require an actual operational casino. Patrons are enticed to make small deposits. They proceed to play, steadily losing money until eventually they are offered ridiculously large “reload” bonuses to make a sizeable deposit.

The results are the same, although instead of disappearing, these online casinos stall withdrawal of your winnings or confiscate them for spurious reasons.

Not everyone can make the list of the fastest paying online casinos. Some may even try to not pay you at all – ever.

Often implemented in tandem with deposit theft, this is a more intermittent, long-term scam. Denying a player access to their legitimate winnings using the flimsiest excuses is deplorable, but it can be worked, with patience, into a long-term grift.

The way this works is you make your deposit, you play for a while, and either through a series of small but exciting wins—or a big Grand Prize win, you suddenly have more than enough in your account than you need for your gaming, so you elect to withdraw some of your winnings.

But the withdrawal process is ended prematurely as the casino insists that it cannot process your withdrawal. You may be offered an excuse, perhaps flimsy, perhaps untrue (such as accusing you of deception), but whatever the excuse, you can’t get to your winnings, and the online casino can.

There are legitimate reasons for an online casino to withhold payment on a legitimate win. For instance, your winnings may be tied to sign-up or reload bonus money for which you have not yet fulfilled the playthrough requirements.

Top Tip

Check the casino’s terms and conditions—particularly those involving bonuses—before you accuse them of theft.

Online casinos don’t have Lady Gaga to headline shows or even 99-cent shrimp cocktails to get you in the door. What they do have, however, is deposit bonuses.

Now, all online casinos—legitimate or otherwise—offer sign-up bonuses, and most offer redeposit bonuses. These bonuses must be earned, i.e., you must gamble a specified amount to get access to that bonus.

What differentiates a legitimate deposit bonus from a likely scam is the sheer too-good-to-be-true quality of the prize itself.

A legitimate online casino might offer to match your initial deposit with a bonus of 100% and then require you to gamble the equivalent of 30x your initial deposit (called “rollover”) to earn that bonus. This is standard.

Some online casino scams wait for you to lose most of your initial deposit and then offer you a gobsmackingly large reload bonus. How does a 400% bonus sound to you? Enticing? Of course, it is. Never mind the 70x rollover—and the minimum deposit of $500.

By the way, the rollover to earn that $2000 bonus is a playthrough of $35,000.

It’s a sad fact that while your momma may love you, the rest of the world knows you only through your social information: your name, your personal statistics (age, hair color, etc.), and the history of your social activities, particularly those involving finances.

A scammer armed with just your name, your social security number, and some info from one of your credit cards can effectively destroy your life, clearing out bank accounts, running up lines of credit, wreaking havoc on that credit rating you spent years building.

Want to buy a house? You can forget that. You can forget ever getting another credit card. That’s identity theft.

Stealing your deposit or even refusing to pay you your winnings seems almost mild compared to the havoc identity theft can wreak.

And shifty online casinos are perfectly poised to take advantage of this explosion of ID theft. They are, after all, already criminals. Why not broaden their suite of “services” to include identity theft?

Once it has your personal information (you do remember providing it when you signed up, right?), the online casino can either use the data it harvested, or it can sell it to a third party—giving up some of that sweet stolen money but eliminating—or at least masking—evidence of its thievery.

It’s not always better to give than to receive—not when you’re the victim of an online casino that injects malware into your system.

The horror of malware—from a simple virus and trojans to backdoors and even spyware that tracks everything you do on your computer—is very real and not just limited to online casinos.

There are almost as many delivery systems for malware as there are types of malware. Malicious code may be embedded in that slot app you downloaded to your iPhone; a backdoor to your computer may have been opened by that email with the attachment you read yesterday.

The types of malware are many, but they tend to fall into a few main categories.

These emails alert you to bogus problems with your bank or credit card account. They will often use logos and even verbiage from genuine bank correspondence to convince you of their legitimacy.

They’ll typically provide a link you can visit to “correct your problem.” As they say in the movies: “Don’t go there.”

Ransomware is perhaps the most deserving of our fear and loathing. A malicious program is delivered to your computer. At the appropriate time, it activates—typically freezing all other operations on the computer.

It holds your files and apps hostage, all the while providing messages that threaten to delete or otherwise destroy all data on the machine (or even every machine on your network) unless those ransom demands are met.

Backdoors are the most prevalent of this type of malware. Backdoors are just that—secret or hidden pathways for outsiders to enter the private domain of your laptop or smartphone.

Confidential personal information can be harvested, and keyloggers—software that tracks every keystroke, including passwords—can be installed.

Malware is a problem endemic to the entire internet, not just the online casino industry. Still, I include it here as a threat from Internet casino scammers simply because you’re far more likely to receive a bit of spyware from a site that already has software on your computer than from a site you’ve had no commerce with.

Legitimate online gambling sites offer a proprietary app to play their games or use their sports and racebooks. These can be trusted.

But there are plenty of malign casino apps –usually trying very hard to look like the legitimate ones—available from the app stores run by Apple and Google.

These apps are generally pretty easy to spot since the reviews are full of one or two-word reviews like “SCAM!” and “Don’t download!”

These casino scams aren’t hidden. The online casino might have their appallingly unfair payout schedule buried somewhere in their site map, and you might even find it provided you are diligent and persistent.

And that’s part of the problem. One of the toughest things about identifying rigged games at online casinos is the sheer difficulty of first determining the rigged game and, second, proving it.

We all know the house has the advantage (and if you’re not already aware of this, perhaps gambling is not for you). We accept that because we think we can win anyway. Hey, we’re human beings.

And variance—that event horizon between house advantage and lucky streak—says we’ve got a shot, which is all we want.

There are as many ways to rig a game online as there are games themselves. Here are a few of the most prevalent.

The rigging can be pretty subtle. The near-miss is a way to encourage players to continue playing, despite losing consistently. The winning combination on a slot machine—flaming sevens—comes up with the first two flaming sevens in the winning position (centerline) and the third slightly above or below the centerline.

So close, you say with a shake of your head and hit the spin button again. The Nevada Gaming Commission has admitted that while these near-miss situations on slot machines can seem deceptive, they are too prevalent to be outlawed.

However, they outlaw “secondary decision” spins that deceptively suggested a win was just a nudge away.

If you were around the online gambling world in the early 2000s, you have heard of the insider collusion that scandalized the world of online poker playing.

You can easily find information about the eventual insolvency of Absolute Poker. Still, the short story is this: In 2007, the online poker room employees colluded to cheat players during a tournament, with one employee playing and the other feeding him information about this competitors’ cards.

Employees of Excapsa had installed unauthorized software routines that revealed opponents’ hole cards to them during each game.

One way shady online casinos skim money from their patrons is by manipulating the random-number generators responsible for the results of every card dealt, every wheel spun, and every keno number hit.

Online casinos use random number generators—or, to be more specific, they use pseudo-random number generators—to produce the results for every game.

If you want to know the difference between pseudorandom and actual random number generation, here’s a fascinating article about just that. The short story is that PRNGs are pretty efficient and dependable for online and real-world gambling devices.

But RNG can be faked—and quite quickly when everything takes place behind the anonymizing curtain of the Internet.

Incidentally, we’ve already looked and how to identify them.

I know what you’re thinking: OMG! What could be worse than all the horror stories you’ve already told me? The quick answer is that the worst online casino scam is the one you got taken in by.

And I agree. You have my sympathy.

So, to avoid becoming just another virtual chalk outline in the internet’s ongoing war with online casinos scams, remember this: Despite the apparent ease with which you can be parted with your money, your winnings, and your very identity, these online casino scammers are very easy to thwart.

So, my final answer to your question is straightforward.

This is the way to combat concerted attempts to steal money and information. It has the benefit of ensuring you’re not dealing with online casinos that lose track of your money through sloth or even mismanagement.

Legitimate online casinos have vast amounts of money invested in simply getting certified and licensed to operate in your state, province, and country.

And why is that important? Because certification and licensure mean that the online casino must operate according to very specific gaming regulations of your state, province, or country.

We here at GamblingSites.com have several sources you can use to start vetting your prospective online casinos. Of course, I already mentioned our blacklist, but to save you the long scroll upward, there it is again.

And now, here’s our curated list of safe online casinos.