Unfortunately, we have had the likes of Cassava trotting out the same reassurances to players, and of course the Everymatrix cases where an agent for the casino even said that the player "should have known we were connected"..... "because we both operate under a shared license".
Trust has to be both ways, players have learned the hard way to interpret a shared license as meaning casinos are connected, and we have also learned the hard way that we will often be lied to by CS if they feel that our decision to deposit will be adversely affected were they to admit they were connected to another casino. Even the most reputable casinos from the past have pulled such stunts, even formerly accredited casinos. Trust is at rock bottom between some long standing players and the industry, we have either been victims ourselves, narrowly avoided getting caught out by the traps by reading of the misfortune of others, or see how this keeps on happening to others with regulators seeming to have little interest in doing anything about it.
I have seen the connections between our high street names, but we won't have one brand confiscating our purchase without a refund because of something we did at another of their brands, it wouldn't be legal, let alone good business practice. These connections instead are what leads to our data somehow "leaking" from one brand to another for the purposes of advertising and mailshots. Even charities have recently been embroiled in a scandal over this routine selling on of donors' details as "easy marks" for other charities to send advertising designed to tug at the heartstrings.
The "scam" of charging debit card fees is not confined to a few casinos either, it's a well known Ryanair trick, and it has been exposed as a scam by them to mislead customers by offering unrealistically low headline fares, and then bumping up the final cost with a whole raft of often invented charges so that in some cases it would have been cheaper to fly BA on a scheduled "premium" flight rather than the no-frills Ryanair service. Ryanair have managed to duck and dive around the rules by picking an obscure brand of debit card that attracts no fees, and then constantly changing which card has no fees when too many people begin to use this obscure card. The last one they had for this fee free deal was the "obscure" Neteller Net+ card, which meant that unless one was a keen online player, it's a card one has probably never even heard of.
Here in the UK, consumers are well informed (or to put it into casino language, UK players are "high risk", hence the extra WR and other restrictions), and we have been well informed of the differences between debit and credit cards, so it's not a "conspiracy theory", it's a hard fact that debit card merchant fees are fixed, and are much lower than credit card fees, hence a fee of 2.5% of the payment, the same as a credit card, is a clear case of the fees being used as a source of revenue by someone in the chain, as opposed to just recovering the fees charged by the banks in processing the transaction.
I have also read about a "scam" in the US. It seems their systems can "run a debit card as a credit card", and Walmart have taken exception to the additional costs things like this entail.
This is a pretty good handle on the actual cost of a debit card transaction, yet players are being charged 2.5% of the amount deposited.
To me, this is a "US thing". I don't believe that in the UK we have any say in whether a retailer treats our debit card as a credit card or vice versa, but it does state here that banks stand to make more money from merchants if debit cards are run as credit cards.
It seems to be that as well as being a "US thing", this concept is also a "casino thing", as one explanation of a percentage fee for debit card is that it is, in fact, being processed as a credit card, so the entity benefitting from this "scam" is some middleman in the payment chain, but in this case the consumer is the one paying the price, not the merchant, in the additional 2.5% fee. In the US, the consumer does not pay a price, the merchant ends up paying more when the consumer chooses "credit" when using their debit card at a terminal in the mistaken belief that this gives them the additional protections of a credit card transactions for their debit card transactions.
Hardly surprising that big retailers are kicking up a fuss over there.
Maybe we could open up a separate convo?
Wish i could provide better news at this stage, and I apologize.
I will gladly set up a thread with you on that subject.
