I will explain as best I can...
I recently took a 200% bonus offer at a well known Casino. Deposited £50 and they gave me £150 to play with on a 25x wager. I had £2500 worth of bets to complete before the bonus balance would move over to cash. I started out fairly well playing Avalon at 60p bets, but after around 40 minutes I got the "Forest Falls" bonus with trailing wilds and the game completely froze. Tried refreshing and it wouldn't load. It was late and the support was offline so I decided to move onto Siberian Storm with the rest of my cash. I had around £200 remaining at this point.
Siberian Storm, and a selection of other IGT games were up and down over the next hour but my balance ended up trickling away. Once my balance reached £0 the bonus wager I had was set as complete. I wondered what would happen to my Avalon 2 bonus and to my surprise when it finally loaded the £76 bonus went directly into my cash balance and was with-drawable, effectively bypassing the wager requirement that the bonus was earned under.
I do believe that with a close review of the play logs this could be discovered, however I also believe a user could very easily hide this method by depositing again after a wager was "complete" and unless a review covered every single individual wager and at what point a bonus was received and then played I think it could easily be missed as it does not involve high or unusual bets.
The scale at which this could be abused, especially considering the larger % bonuses that carry tough wager requirements is huge. As far as I am aware, information regarding a pending bonus is held on the side of the software operator and not the casino so I would expect this bug to affect many Casinos, although nothing beyond what I accidentally discovered has been tested in any way.
Let me know if you have any queries and I will answer as best I can.
- T