EvoBet - license

Hi dancul30skye - welcome back!

Unfortunately there's not going to be anything we can do to help you in this case.

First, you are correct that as a UK citizen you should not be playing with EvoBet casino. They are breaking UK law by accepting your custom. However, the lack of a license is a taxation/licensing issue that does not have any bearing on whether or not the gambling transaction was fair. We would not seek reimbursement of losses on these grounds alone.

For your information - EvoBet are owned by CW Marketing BV who also run Campeon Bet.

Sorry we could not be of more help!

ThePOGG

Hi ThePogg

I have had an interesting reply from UKGC that I’ll send to you re casinos not registered in the U.K. just in case it’s of any interest.

Thanks

Dancul30

Hi dancul30skye,

I'm likely already aware of the UKGC's position - they would like all complaint services to rule against any operator that accepts UK traffic without a license. Unfortunately there are multiple problems with this position and we did not align with it even when we were functioning as an ADR for the UKGC.

Firstly, if every complaint were to be ruled on this basis regardless of any other factors what we open the door to is a large number of players intentionally signing-up to unlicensed operators, if they win they expect to be paid, if they lose they immediately come to us demanding their money back. This encourages players to play at unlicensed venues thinking they can free-roll the casino. We're always happy to help people, but not where they're misusing the system and it is frightening the number of players that only realise that the site they've signed up with didn't have a UK license after they've had a loss.

Secondly, time and time again we've reported operators who are accepting UK traffic without a license to the UKGC and so far have not found a single instance of the regulator actually being able to stop these companies. Where the regulator cannot prevent this expecting dispute mediation sites to make the difference is far fetched.

Finally, we operate in a lot of markets. The UK is one of them. While this type of operator is accepting UK traffic illegally, in many other markets they are functioning perfectly legitimately. These operators are not going to start returning funds to all UK players as that would open a flood gate for them. Us ruling against them on this basis would alienate these groups when it comes to managing complaints from non-UK players. So in effect by taking this position we would end up being unable to help with non-UK complaints as well as UK complaints. No-one wins in that circumstance.

So the reality here is that by taking a position where we tried to enforce license prohibitions that the regulator cannot we would only end up disadvantaging the players we could actually help.

If the UKGC communication says something different to the above I'd be interested to see it.

Thanks,

ThePOGG

Hi ThePogg

I’ve sent it through, it wasn’t actually anywhere near as detailed as your response and they don’t ask me to contact an ADR. They do ask me to escalate my complaint with the companies in question (but when I tried to do this with another overseas casino they just blocked me and stopped answering. When I asked Evobet in a livechat the actually told me that it was fine to play from the UK and it wasn’t breaking any laws to do so, and encouraged me to keep playing.)

UKGC basically ask me to try the companies and then said ‘I could try and contact the government of curacao’.

Weirdly in the email the UKGC plainly say that the specific casinos I mentioned are not allowed to accept UK players and that they have passed the information I gave them on to the relevant department to follow it up. In my experiences with UKGC this far they have been non-commital in every way so I just found the email all a bit surprising!

I get ThePogg’s logic of not opening up the can of overseas worms, that makes sense, but think surely the UKGC could cooperate with the curacao regulators to impose punishments/investigate any wrongdoing in terms of the geography of players, rather than expecting any individual player to write an open letter to the Prime Minister of Curacao. I very much doubt I’m the only one that’s ever found myself playing in a non-UK casino.

Anyway thanks-I’m not actually asking anything of you here just sharing info.

Dancul30