Report on the mediation attempt - failed.
About three weeks ago I contacted a mediator / webmaster who I believed might be interested in attempting to resolve the matter between the aggrieved Blackjack players and Angelciti, regarding the 200% "sticky bonus" campaign which resulted in the theft of approximately $20,000 of our collective winnings. The person in question chooses to remain anonymous, so I'll call them "M" for brevity's sake.
Things looked very good for quite some time; contact was established with Larry Hartmann (the boss (chairman?) at Angelciti, along with his partner George). An offer was tentatively put on the table by M, by which the players would receive a 50% payment, the remaining 50% to be returned to our playing balances for further wagering - thus giving us a crack at winning our full cashouts back again. M pointed out this would need to be agreed by the players, but Larry liked the look of it. However, it would seem that Larry and George are not alone in the managerial equation - there are a host of "partners" to whom they answer, and who would need to be consulted before any deal could be agreed to. In the meantime, I stuck in a load of conditions of my own which basically would have given the players complete freedom in playing and cashing out from the 50% that would have been returned to our playing balances. M agreed that my conditions were fair, and reckoned a deal looked hopeful.
Larry has now informed M that there will be no deal - the "partners" have refused the offer.
Their reasoning is: many, if not all, the Blackjack players who LOST their deposits have now had those deposits refunded to them. If the casino were now to offer to pay the players from whom they stole the winnings even a PORTION of those winnings, this would result in a lose / lose situation for the casino. Winners win; losers have deposits refunded.
Sorry people, they're keeping our money. No deal.
Needless to say, M wasn't very happy about this, and while both of us comprehend the casino's stance, we both also entirely disagree with it. This was a botched-up job from the word go on the part of Angelciti; First, they lied: they quickly cobbled together a second Email offer, which discluded Blackjack, and claimed this was the ONLY offer that had ever existed - failing to note that the original Blackjack-inclusive one had been copiously posted all over the net! They also cobbled version no. 2 together so quickly that the part where they simply removed the reference to "all games inclusive" left ludicrously worded phrases and incorrect grammar! Read it for yourself: "At the AngelCiti family of casinos you can play everything*, from Caribbean Stud to from to Video Poker and still get this amazing 200% offer." They removed the games, but they forgot to remove the prepositions! After having had the evidence presented to them, they invoked their "right" to withhold winnings at their whim, citing an example of a recent occurrence with AMAZON as a reasonable precedent!
I would like to offer two maybe more relevant "precedents"; CON 007, Stanley Acropolis BJ 2:1 Day. On both these occasions, the casinos in question lost a lot of money. Casino On Net lost about, what $3,000,000, wasn't it? SA lost a packet as well, certainly in big six figures; in the case of Casino On Net, the 007 promo was a mistake - they really didn't know what they were letting themselves in for. In BOTH CASES, the casinos in question - QUALITY casinos - did the right thing and PAID THE PLAYERS IN FULL. The casino makes the error, so the CASINO ACCEPTS FULL RESPONSIBILITY. As such, they bought themselves a LOAD of goodwill and have gone from strength to strength since then.
Not so in the case of Angelciti: the casino accepted that the PLAYERS were right and THEY were wrong.
Nonetheless, they refused to pay the winners, invoking their stated "right" to steal at will and as they see fit. This was for a grand total not exceedingwait for it$20,000. Not much, in comparison to what Casino On Net and Stanley Acropolis paid out, one has to say.
In the meantime, far from hanging their heads in some embarrassment over the whole thing and hoping that the matter would die away, they've been shamelessly issuing glowing press reports about their ever more profitable quarterly results and instructing their boilerroom brokers (
) to attempt to dump their junk stock on the players whose privacy they have violated by passing their names on to them. Remember, those quarterly results contain large chunks of stolen money.
This is a casino without the remotest sense of fairplay or the smallest shred of decency.
There are upsides to all this; M is not a person without influence. In fact, I would take a guess that many adverts and affiliate relationships are going to bite the dust as a result of this. I'll certainly be doing what I can to ensure this happens to the maximum, and I know other interested parties who will not let this rest. Beyond that, there are matters currently in the melting pot which cannot be disclosed, but which are going to make life very uncomfortable for Angelciti.
In short: they won't be getting away with this.
I'd like to anonymously thank "M" for their assistance in this matter, who was really quite surprised and disappointed to have failed to achieve a resolution. I was also disappointed, as the casino had a great opportunity to put this matter to bed for good. I was not in slightest surprised, however.
(Bryan, please don't ever take them out the Rogue section; let them rot there for good.)
