What you are actually choosing when you choose a brand

A casino brand is a "trading name" (a licence names a company, and never a website), and the thing a player enters into a relationship with is the company holding the licence behind it, which on this page, going by the register itself, is a company with a public conduct record that the brand's own pages have no reason to mention. The record consists of one settlement with the British regulator, and it is both larger and better documented than anything in the award column.

A reader will object that an action against the operator is not an action against this particular "site". The failings were the operator's, and so is the licence (along with the terms, the cashier and the complaints desk).

No award, for the brand or for the company behind it

No winners list that we opened carries this brand at all, and we found the same for the eleven brands its operator trades under (eleven names, searched one at a time), which we checked as a group because an award at operator level would have counted here. What the public record holds for this company is not a trophy but a "regulatory action", and the distance between those two words is the whole of this review.

The scale of the operator is worth establishing before anything else, because it changes how a single brand page should be read, and on the British register this licensee carries 232 rows of domain names (19 of them active, 84 inactive and 129 marked "White Label"), which makes it a platform with a great many front doors rather than a casino with a website.

What the Gambling Commission required, and in which words

The "settlement" is a payment of 500,000 pounds "in lieu of a financial penalty", together with 13,594 pounds towards the costs of the investigation (the costs are not part of the sum itself), concluded in May 2022 after a review opened under section 116 of the Gambling Act on 3 September 2020. Those two sums are separate things, and the first of them is a settlement rather than a fine, which is a distinction the Commission draws and most summaries do not.

The conditions found breached are specific enough to be looked up individually, and we print them in full for that reason. They are licence condition 12.1.1 at paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 together with licence condition 12.1.2 at paragraph 1, both of them about the prevention of money laundering; then the social responsibility code, at provision 3.4.1 paragraphs 1 and 2, on "customer interaction"; and provision 3.9.1 of the same code, on multiple accounts held by one person (four provisions, each with a number of its own).

That last provision is the one worth pausing on, because it is the least discussed of the four and the easiest for a player to meet. A rule about one person holding several accounts exists to stop a "self-excluded" or a limited customer from simply opening another, which makes it a social responsibility rule wearing the costume of an administrative one (the costume is clerical, and the purpose is not).

Where the record is not, which is the register

The register no longer carries this case. The page that set it out (detail 175, as the register numbered it) now redirects to a "not found" message, while the business page for account 39175 states that no regulatory actions are recorded against the business, which is a sentence a reader could easily take for an answer.

It is not an answer. The reason is a filing rule and not a finding, because the Commission holds enforcement entries on its register for a bounded period and retires its "public statements" at three years, so for anything concluded before November 2023 the durable source is the reporting of the time (November 2023 is where the register now begins); a blank page on a register is housekeeping, and it never means that nothing occurred.

Because of that we applied a higher bar than usual before printing the figures. Two independent accounts published at the time (two witnesses, written separately) agree on the sum, on the costs, on the date when the section 116 review was opened and on every condition listed above, and where a number cannot be read at the regulator itself, we would rather show you the two witnesses we have than quietly rest on one.

Eight brands, one licence, one record

The same company trades as Aladdin Slots, Big Thunder Slots, Buffalo Spins, Crystal Slots, Dove Slots, Express Wins and Incredible Spins alongside this brand, and all eight sit under the "single licence" that the settlement concerned, so a reader comparing two of those names inside this "estate" is not comparing two companies, however different the artwork looks.

The licensee, and the entitlements on its licence

Jumpman Gaming Limited is an Alderney company, and its British licence (039175-R-319452-025, account 39175) has covered remote casino and remote bingo since 1 November 2014, with no betting entitlement of any kind attached to it. The company has belonged to Super Group since 1 September 2022 (four months after the settlement was concluded), which matters because an owner that arrives afterwards inherits a record it did not make.

Two further arrangements belong in the same paragraph, and one of them is instructive. Ontario is served through The Six Gaming Limited on the provincial list, while in Spain a licence is held by Jumpman Gaming Spain PLC which publishes no domain at all, so a Spanish "authorisation" in this group demonstrates something that exists on paper (a permission, and not a product).

The score, and the shortness of the file behind it

The numeric reading is high and the file behind it is very short. Casino Guru had this brand at nine point zero on the twentieth of October, filing the "Safety Index" result inside its "Very high" band, and the whole dispute file behind that figure amounts to five complaints.

Five is too few for us to lean on, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving the number to do work it cannot. A short file on one address inside an estate of 232 domains describes that address and nothing else, the portal computes it from terms and cases rather than from the operator's history, and a figure read on one day in October is no "forecast" for any other (232 domains, five complaints).

The look-up that takes one minute

The method worth taking from this page reverses the usual order of reading, and it is the single most useful minute you can spend on any casino. Find the operating company in the "footer", search the regulator's register for that company rather than for the brand, and then search the regulator's news pages for the same name (the register forgets, and the news pages do not).

Do that here, as we did, and you will find a licensed operator in good standing on a register that has quietly dropped the most important thing it ever recorded about it. The brand has no award, the operator has no award, and what it does have cost it 513,594 pounds!

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  Videoslots

  MGA/CRP/258/2014, Videoslots Limited (Malta)

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  888 Casino

  Virtual Digital Services Limited under MGA/CRP/121/2006, as the operator's own terms state · 888 UK Limited, Gambling Commission account 39028, in Britain

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  Spin Genie

  MGA/CRP/171/2009/01, Skill On Net Limited (Malta)

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What the regulator has done

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