ThePogg site blacklisted Viggoslots for reasons, which have nothing in common with the fact, how we treat our players or not.
After we asked for the reason of blacklisting Viggoslosts, we were told that we are blacklisted due to unsolved complaints raised with ThePogg by our players so we have asked be provided by Duncan all of them. Once we solved all the complaints and asked to be removed from the blacklist we were told that it is because of our sub licence which is connected to more whitelabels and some of them do not cooperate with ThePogg at all. What we did? We moved to another licence, where it is just us and asked The Pogg again. Unfortunately we were told once more than we will stay blacklisted, because our ex colleagues wrote on their own to ThePogg their opinions and even though we took actions on it and fired all the people connected to this incident we were told again that we cannot be removed from the blacklist and again we were told that the problem is not that Viggoslots is doing something which is not good, but that there might be connections between us and ''someone'' who does not care what ThePogg thinks.
Sadly this isn't quite an accurate reflection of the issues with ViggoSlots or their interactions with ThePOGG. This is going to be a long post so settle in.
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First, ViggoSlots were added to the Blacklist because they ran on the Danguad Ltd license. For those who have followed this group in recent times you'll be aware of some absolute scorchers of complaints that have come up.
Here's a couple where Danguad operators changed their terms after players won to justify non-payment of the win (we caught them out as we were monitoring their terms pages
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Here's one where a Danguad licensee appears to have faked evidence in a complaint (the bet that they claim the player made that exceeded the max bet term was impossible on the game in question and the operator just stopped responding when this was pointed out):
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Here's one where a Danguad licensee have decided it's okay to free roll an entire country (they'll let players sign-up and deposit but won't pay out winnings):
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In short, these aren't trivial issues, there have been a clear cluster of operators who want to engage in patently unfair practices gravitate towards this license and the license holder is very clearly taking no interest in policing the activities of their licensees. We have very solid reason to view operators that are part of this group as 'high risk to players'.
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So let's move on to the activities of ViggoSlots themselves. When they found out they were Blacklisted, a couple of Viggoslots representatives decided to go on a little trolling mission on Facebook. They sent abusive messages to our team and went around posting vague statements about ThePOGG being "blacklisted" on other Facebook accounts that have mentioned us.
A few things to say about this. Firstly, these people weren't open or honest about posting as representatives of Viggoslots. It was my own work that spotted something off about the comments, because the personal Facebook accounts that were making the posts were also liking posts associated with Viggoslots. You can see what we found here -
Next, one of the people in question then decided to email us and threaten a lawsuit against us due to "personal discrimination". This person was wholly convinced that the company would be funding their legal action.
And finally in this section I'd like to address the claims the Viggoslots rep makes that the people responsible for this activity are "ex colleagues", obviously implying that they were fired. This simply isn't a particularly believable claim. One of the accounts involved changed the surname on the account shortly after we made our own post highlighting their activity so that both of the accounts then had the same surname. That account contacted another affiliate on the 22nd of May trying to get the affiliate to promote Viggoslots. So they've been sacked, but they're still happy to do marketing work for free......
This saga in itself would have been enough to warrant Blacklist status without the license association.
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The change of license. Things get interesting here. The platform provider Netagame have two license clients that we're aware of: Danguad Ltd and Gammix STS B.V.
Netagame are a white label platform provider. Now, up until recently the only client on the Gammix license that we've been aware of has been Sugar Casino. Unlike all the other Netagame clients, Sugar casino were actually responsive to complaints for a while and the rep emailed from both an @sugar and @netagame email address. This would certainly seem to indicate that
Sugar casino and the Gammix license are the casino that Netagame actually run themselves. All the other Netagame partners that we've been aware of ran on the Danguad license. I could take a guess at the structure being used here. Would anyone else care to? Viggoslots moved from Danguad to Gammix.
This isn't a problem in itself, but neither does it disassociate Viggoslots from the problem group. In fact it just comes over as a rather weak attempt to change nothing while claiming there's been a fundamental shift.
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Resolving complaints - have Viggoslots spoken to us to manage a couple of complaints? Yeah. But that doesn't really give a clear picture as one of those complaints hasn't been appropriately or fairly managed in our opinion.
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- the player made a single bet that exceeded their maximum allowed bet, AND IT LOST, yet the operator felt this was sound grounds to void all the winnings from the compliant's bets.
This is a predatory enforcement of a max bet rule on what is very clearly a player error and one that cost the casino nothing. Effectively there has been no detriment caused here and the operator has just used this as a cash grab to get out of paying a four figure win.
This by itself would be grounds for Not Recommended status.
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And let's move on to "connections" to "someone who does not care what ThePOGG thinks". This issue is discussed here -
To summarise that article, when we reviewed the Viggoslots affiliate program the contact email address provided on their site was "
affiliates@slotsmoon.com". For those not familiar with this name Slotsmoon are one of two casinos represented by StayBet Affiliates (the other being Staybet). If you want to take a look at how this group treat players take a look here -
Same story every time - the complaining player just isn't getting paid. We've even been told by this operator:
Staybet said:
The site is under updates and therefore we are not able to process any withdrawals for the moment, we would like to do so once the site and back office is updated.
That was over 2 months ago and players still haven't been paid and was offered up as an explanation 4 months after all the payment issues started cropping up. So updating their back office has already taken 6 months when their players are just expected to 'lump it' that the money they're rightly owed is withheld. Paying players isn't a matter of whether it's convenient or not.
Returning to Viggoslots, why would they put the contact email address for one of their competitors in where potential advertising partners are going to try and contact them? This certainly hasn't just been a typo. So that leaves two plausible explanations - the teams for these groups are in someway connected or Viggoslots borrowed some code for their aff site from Staybet. Neither's good and frankly I've seen no other evidence to support the idea that the code's been copied in terms of design. Viggoslots have not been able to offer any explanation for this.
It's also worth noting that the reps for both groups that we've interacted with all seem to have roots in Sweden. Just an interesting little coincidence.
Staybet are Blacklisted for very good reason.
This would be grounds for Blacklist status for Viggoslots all by itself.
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Does anyone here feel that our grounds for maintaining Viggoslots Blacklist status is in question?
I'll be frank, I'm sick to the back teeth of dealing with the drama that this lot create because of their own poor business decisions and business practice. But there you have it, another hour spent cleaning up the mess that Viggoslots have made. Sadly there's been a bit of that to do behind the scenes as well each time we make clear that we're not going to change our position.
TP
You still have to wager your deposit minimum 4x, so it gives them some advantage. And if you deposit lets say EUR20 and take a 100% cash bonus, the max you can withdraw is EUR120. Not really that enticing when you think that is less than a WL on DOA @ EUR0.09.
