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
This is an old exploit, much as I described. You discovered it by accident due to another bug in the software that froze your game and wouldn't let you continue. It is THEIR fault that such bugs sometimes lead to the discovery of usable exploits, and this is how many of them were first discovered.
This can be widely exploited, and it WAS, quite ruthlessly. For several years, this one went largely unnoticed by casinos as they were not really looking at withdrawals from pure cash deposits as they were focussed on the "bonus abuse" aspect of advantage play.
However, widespread use of this exploit eventually lead to most operators becoming aware of it, and so most now check more thoroughly. They don't need to look at every wager for every player, they just have to look for players who's win statistics suggest that they might be using this method, and then thoroughly check their wagers.
Many casinos now have something within their terms that specifically covers this type of play as it is a hard one to deal with using the usual "irregular play" terms as the withdrawal is made from a deposit without a bonus, and thus confiscating a win would probably cause the operator to end up in the rogue pit unless they were willing to reveal to Max just EXACTLY what was going on, which at first many software providers were not prepared to do as it would involve admitting to a serious bug in their software.
Microgaming has been full of such bugs, and a few have been exploitable, the most recent being an "emptier" for the newest Dark Knight slot that lasted for 8 days before being quietly patched.
Your incident shows that despite having been fixed in the Viper download, this old exploit is very much alive in the multi provider platforms, probably because of how they track bonus wagering at the platform level, rather than at software provider level.
Maybe these platform operators should worry less about Scrooge, and more about this old exploit still being viable on their product. I expect those that weren't are aware now that it has been posted here. What they need to implement is an unfinished game check, which would have seen that there was a "stuck" wager on Avalon, and not to clear the remaining WR; which is how the WR tracking now works (if not properly) in the Viper download.
Many years ago, this worked on RTG too, and they have those high percentage phantom bonuses. RTG fixed their tracking, and operators now know about it. Advantage players probably helped the operators find out by constantly pestering CS to fix the WR tracker, and this must have lead to management (or RTG) investigating why some specific players had so much bother with a system that worked fine for most other players.
You will probably be unpopular with the beatingbonuses forum for highlighting the fact that the multi provider platforms are vulnerable to some exploits that have long since been patched on single software products.
