I personally don’t like Sweepstake casinos. Or what they call the Social casinos.
Reason being that, they play on a loophole, just to walk all over the State gambling laws. The legislature is not stupid. These politicians know it’s all a play of words. All bogus.
So, you’re breaking the law, if you’re playing slots by directly making a deposit at a real money betting site, and not when you’re doing the “exact” same thing but instead using “chips” or “tokens” or “coins” bought from the same deposit.
The Senators need to do a better job. But then, who am I to tell these geniuses what to do.
So this Redditor from Florida played at WOW Vegas, a seemingly well-known social casino. But, they refused to honor their commitment citing FL State laws that limits the sweepstake prize money to $5,000 per person.
He won $15,470 but WOW Casino reduced the payout amount to $5,000 removing $10,470 from the owed balance.
Here’s the thing though.
Florida doesn’t actually limit the prize and redemptions to $5,000. It just wants the companies offering prizes over $5,000 to register themselves locally and deposit a bond or security in the bank. As a consequence, this also opens up a whole new Pandora’s box of scrutiny of accounts and details of their internal operations, something none of these social casinos want to do.
Ok sure, granted. You can do that.
But then, why make these huge jackpots available to the residents of NY and Florida.
These sites have geo-tracking and IP restriction technology employed on their sites for other countries. They could simply hide these games from the residents of these two States, or simply put up a notification in their apps and website that clearly tells the players living in these two places that the maximum they can win is $5K.
This way at least their customers would not feel, for the lack of a better word, cheated.
A Redditor summed it up pretty eloquently:
Everyone claiming this is the state’s fault. There’s no law in Florida that says you can’t have a sweepstakes payout over $5000. The law says if you run a sweepstakes with a payout over $5000, the company running the sweepstakes just has to register it and put the max prize in a bank licensed in the state. The casino is just refusing to meet that condition, which they could easily do.
I don’t know.
To me it feels like robbery. Straight up.
But, then these places can always turn back and say:
“Hey man, you should have read the Terms and Conditions.”
I guess this money now goes into the coffers of WOW Vegas. Not that it needed these $10K to survive. They make millions as is.
Well at least, he is getting paid $5K. I mean there are generally much scarier stories out there. Like people winning $100k fair and square only for the casinos to ban such accounts when they ask for a withdrawal.
The crappiest part is that he’ll also have to report these winnings to the IRS. WOW Vegas would have sent him the tax form. Anything over $600 and these casinos will email you a 1099-MISC.
Thing is, this person can’t even report it to the Gaming Control Boards because these laws were made by them in the first place.
Also, he could try out a real casino that’s legal in the US, like FanDuel. They do have rather strict bonus rules, may not pay until the entire deposit is spent (to cover the playthrough), but they do pay.
Social Casinos can actually pay out more than $5000 provided they file with the State
Like I said above, these companies can overcome the hurdle of paying out more than $5k in winnings by following a simple filing procedure:
Say WOW Vegas wanted to file, this is what it would need to do:
- File an application for the Games of Chance Registration.
- They should promote some kind of service or product (in this case virtual coins), have the prize above $5,000, have no particular prerequisites (other than may be age of 21+) and the winner should be determined by a game of chance (say slots or RNG-powered games).
- Submit a CD or a Bond for the said amount.
- Attach a small soft copy describing how they are advertising the Sweepstakes (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook etc.).
And that’s it.
Once the winning amounts have been dispersed, the names of the winners and their addresses, along with the won amount should be sent to the Florida or the New York Department of State.
It’s as simple as that.
But, like I mentioned above. No social casino wants to go through all this process. It’s so easy for them to just cancel the valid winnings and be done with it.
I certainly don’t expect WOW Vegas or for that matter any other social casino doing the right thing, when doing “nothing” gets the job done.
Perhaps this person would have a better chance of getting paid at a real betting site. May be he should check out DraftKings or FanDuel. At least, there he wouldn’t have to face such dramas.
Social casinos really need to step up and be more honest or go home.