Whilst most online casinos are on the up and up, there are a few ne’er do wells who like to cut corners or try and cheat their players by using fake games.
There are two main reasons why a rogue casino would use fake games, and neither of them are particularly becoming:
- They don’t want to pay the licensing fees – most games come from a relatively small number of producers who charge the casinos to use them. These fees are either based on turnover or net win and are fairly substantial and some shifty sods have decided they’d rather just clone the games than pay for them. Think of this as the equivalent of making pirate copies of a film and then selling tickets to unsuspecting patrons.
- They want to manipulate the results – this is the really worrying part of fake games. One benefit of licensed games is that the game takes place on the software providers servers, meaning there is no opportunity for the casinos to try and fiddle the results. But a clone operated from a private server could easily be manipulated. A real world equivalent would be fairground games where the ball doesn’t quite fit into the fish bowl that would win you the giant teddy.
Fake games can sometimes simply be shoddy replicas which are fairly easy to spot. But there are also near identical clones that are almost impossible to detect. In fact, sometimes the fact that a game isn’t legitimate is only identifiable from the server that it’s being run from.
Our aim here isn’t to scare you off from playing your favourite games, just to remind you to be diligent around new unknown casinos (especially if they don’t hold a recognisable license or offer too-good-to-be-true bonuses) – stick to well known licensed brands you should be fine.
If you’re planning on ignoring this advice and like to take a walk into the wild west of online gambling then the rest of the page is for you. Here we detail casinos, software and domains who have been caught peddling fake games…