Mandarin Palace (genesys group) Warning

mrodders

Dormant account
Joined
Mar 23, 2012
Location
Essex
Hi Guys.

I wanted to let you know about my experience playing at Mandarin Palace. To start with the ending, they seized all my winnings after playing there because I broke their terms and conditions limiting what games can be played. Fair enough on the face of it, but the way it came about and my treatment by their customer support team made me feel thoroughly entrapped and misused. Anyway I'll tell you about it and let everyone make their own mind up.

I signed up there, claimed the sign up bonus. I read through their bonus terms and conditions and thinking that I understood what I was allowed to play and what I wasn't I started playing. By the time I had finished I was lucky enough to have pushed my balance up to a pretty significant amount (over £1,500) and put in a withdrawal. A few days later I got an email asking for some identification documents which I provided, but from there I didn't hear anything more.

A week or so later I logged on to find out what was going on and found my balance was sitting at £200. Looking at my statement it seemed my withdrawal had been reversed and there had been a manual adjustment to my balance. Originally I thought this meant that I couldn't withdraw the bonus and they were just going to pay me my deposit and winnings, but I went onto live chat anyway to confirm. Here is the conversation that followed:

mandarinpalacelivechat.jpg

In summary after talking to this incredibly rude live chat guy, it turned out that there was another set of terms and conditions on the site which was the same as the bonus terms except added in was something saying that UK players could only play slots. Please see the (almost identical) set of terms:

palaceTerms1.jpg
palaceTerms2.png

Notice that they are exactly the same! Same wording, same numbering, same title, except that the set hidden in the middle of the overall terms and conditions has had another term added which excludes Uk players from playing anything but slots.

If this was a UK based company then they definitely wouldn't be able to get away with terms like these. They have effectively contradicting terms aimed at catching out the player! I wouldn't hesitate to escalate and take this further (through some sort of court proceedings). But as they're supposedly governed under the law of the Netherlands Antilles I suppose there's nothing I can do.

They entrapped me into breaking their terms and conditions, didn't even tell me what had happened till i enquired. Then I was pretty much told I was a criminal and to f off by the customer service.
I have no hope of getting my money back but thought I would warn everyone here about Mandarin Palace and urge everyone to stay away!

Thanks for listening to my rant! Sorry if it's a bit rambling, this has made me really angry.
Michael
 
This is a dodgy outfit set up to get around the US laws, in particular the UIGEA. They are not really after non US players in the first place, but to state "US players only" would make it pretty obvious to the US authorities that they have been set up especially to serve them and get around the laws there. By accepting non-US players they can claim they are accepting ALL players that their licensing jurisdiction allows, which just happens to include the US. They will also argue that US laws have no relevence to them as they are not US based, and are engaged in a global business.

The bullshit is that they believe players from the UK and Greece are guilty purely because of where they live, not because of how they have played. Their claim that "all innocent players" read and understand the terms is complete bollocks. The fact is, ONLY UK and Greek players have to worry about this term, players from the US who have not read it will not be affected as they can rely on the headline rules and weighting table presented simply and clearly in the bonus rules, and will understand this because it contains no sneaky proviso tucked away in only one of the two versions of bonus terms.

They are no doubt "licensed" by a country that doesn't give a rat's arse about fair play and consumer protection, so they can do this and get away with it, just like a number of other rogue casino groups, most notable of which is Virtual, who target the UK with it's "Cirrus UK" branded RTG casino.

When they first came out, they were "invitation only", and were largely unnoticed. If a non US player tried to register they were told only US players were allowed, but this was NOT mentioned on the website (for US authorities to spot".

They have recently been posting CDs and letters to UK households, and this is one way UK players get suckered in. On the one hand they have a predatory term that indicates they don't really want to have UK and Greek players, yet they have SPECIFICALLY targeted them through postal marketing. This would be a breach of UK law, but unenforceable because the letters would have been posted abroad. If a UK based company had done this, they would be in trouble.

US players are unlikely to suffer from this bullshit, as they are the target market without which this operator would struggle.

Better research beforehand may have revealed signs that things would not go well with this outfit.

Grand Prive are another group to avoid at present. Dodgy business practices, had their license revoked by the KGC and had to find a less strict jurisdiction to operate from, and screwed over their marketing partners who had brought them their players. Same software as Mandarin Palace, and the same "UK hating" attitude, so some believe they have a secret connection.

It seems that this UK hatred is because we have had the most liberal gambling laws in the developed world, and were the FIRST major country to recognise that the online casino business needed a legitimate framework, rather than be persecuted out of existence. Other licensing jurisdictions don't count, as although they were offering licenses long before the UK, it was 100% about the money, and they all had one thing in common - the operators were forbidden to accept customers from the countries granting them a license, because these countries wanted to protect their own citizens, but didn't care about protecting the rest of the world if it lost them money. UK licenses are different, UK players can be accepted too.
 
Mandarin Palace set a trap hoping to deny you your winnings imo.
"Ed" saying you were not an innocent player clearly insinuates guilt. WTH?!
The way the T&Cs differ - by the insertion of a single line applicable to only UK and Greek residents is shameful.
It makes Mandarin Palace look shady and cheap that they would send out bonus promotions and not include ALL applicable terms.
 
Mandarin Palace set a trap hoping to deny you your winnings imo.
"Ed" saying you were not an innocent player clearly insinuates guilt. WTH?!
The way the T&Cs differ - by the insertion of a single line applicable to only UK and Greek residents is shameful.
It makes Mandarin Palace look shady and cheap that they would send out bonus promotions and not include ALL applicable terms.

It's made worse because they have TWO different versions of the same terms, one with, and one without, this extra line.

Purely by chance this will be 50/50 as to which set a player reads, and having read one set, they will believe they have read "all the terms and conditions" since the other set is a duplicate, obvious at a first glance.

If you went to a newsagent and saw your daily paper, and then another pile of the same paper caught your eye with the same front page, you would not read every word of that page all over again to see if it was the same paper or not, you would decide that it is from a first glance. If an additional line or two had been added to the story, a later print run for example, you would not think to look for it.

This is not about a player not bothering to read the rules, they DID read the rules, but a set that didn't have this extra line, a line which more or less says the entire set of rules does not apply to him, and that a new set derived from that one line does.

This is sloppy work on the part of the casino, not helped by a poor design structure that has repetition across the website. Whoever was tasked with amending the terms failed to do their job properly, and they too clearly fell into the same trap as the player, seeing and altering one set, and believing the job was done.
 
They have recently been posting CDs and letters to UK households, and this is one way UK players get suckered in. On the one hand they have a predatory term that indicates they don't really want to have UK and Greek players, yet they have SPECIFICALLY targeted them through postal marketing. This would be a breach of UK law, but unenforceable because the letters would have been posted abroad. If a UK based company had done this, they would be in trouble.

Yeah, they also had a nice big stand (and a free bar) at the London Affiliate Conference so they're actively targeting UK players. It's a real shame that operations like these can exist with pretty much no accountability. Gives the whole gambling world a bad name.
 

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