Withdrawn: Bingo For Money no-pay player winnings, unresponsive to complaints

maxd

Head of Complaints (PABs), Senior Forum Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Jan 20, 2004
Location
Saltirelandia
Yet another bingo site refusing to pay its players: player had won an $8000 jackpot plus misc regular play winnings for a total of around $8200. Bingo For Money (BFM) set unusually restrictive rules for the player to withdraw and eventually only paid the player about $1800, coincidentally almost exactly what the player had deposited. Thereafter BFM would not discuss the player's situation.

We tried to contact BFM several times. The first few times we received an auto-reply but eventually even those stopped. The casino never responded to the player's issue at all.

Warning: by excessively complicating the withdrawal process and ignoring player complaints Bingo For Money is effectively confiscating player money without justification or explanation. They ignore all attempts to raise issues on the player's behalf. We advise players to avoid Bingo For Money (bingoformoney.ag).
 
The rep for BFM, [profile]MissMD[/profile], has recently discovered this and approached us to resolve the issue. It was my oversight to have not contacted her in the first place. Effective immediately this Warning is under review and may be withdrawn pending the resolution of the original issue and the successful completion of the usual 90-day probation period.
 
The player reports that payment is in progress and the rep says the support people were having email problems when we originally tried to contact them. Fair enough, and given my original oversight I think it would be appropriate to reduce the usual probation period. I think 45 days is fair and reasonable. So that's roughly Dec 15th, give or take a day or two either way. If we receive no further issues regarding BFM within that time this Warning will be withdrawn and archived.

Later: Perhaps I should elaborate as to why this Warning remains even after the rep has come forward and the player issue is well on its way to being resolved. To begin I refer readers to our new article in this forum, Some Guidelines for Warnings.

In that article I try to make it crystal clear that Warnings which are the result of failed Pitch-A-Bitch issues are almost always the result of two problems, not one. The original problem -- I call it "the A problem" in the Guidelines -- is the player issue that began our investigation in the first place. The second issue -- "the B problem" -- is what comes up when we try to solve A. Since it is typically something we've discovered in the way the casino does things or handles player issues it is often a very important part of the Warning itself. In fact it's often a much bigger issue than the player's original PAB.

In the case of Bingo For Money (BFM) the issue was a total failure in communications. After several weeks of emailing to several different addresses within the organisation all I had received was either auto-generated responses or "we've assigned an issue number and will get back to you" which may also have been an automatic response. The point being that at no time did anyone take our emails seriously enough to respond.

The rep says the emails were being tossed as spam because they didn't come from a registered player address. Yeah, okay, I see how that could be a problem. But the emails were addressed to customerservice and then later security, techsupport and promotions when the customerservice emails were being bounced. Surely someone somewhere in all those departments should be able to notice email that comes from something other than a registered player. Surely someone somewhere should have been able to direct me to the appropriate person, in this case the rep. They did not. In fact they did nothing whatsoever. That's what generated the Warning in the first place, it was the B part of the problem.

I don't believe there is a legitimate excuse for one part of the BFM organisation not knowing about the other. If the rep is the only go-to person for player-related issues then the support -- or tech or security or whomever -- should know that and say "contact the rep". It is not the responsibility of the person bringing issues to them to somehow be aware of the internals of the company: the company owes it to their players and others who have to deal with them to be capable enough to direct issues to the appropriate recipient. Trying to fob that responsibility off onto people outside the company -- that is, people who have no reason to know how they conduct their departmental business -- is just lame. Either the company has their shit together and can handle an incoming issue or they don't and they can't. And if they can't then they're doing a shite job (in that specific regard) and that very much is a Warning-worthy issue.

For example, if someone contacts me about something in the Rogue Pit listings they have every reason to expect that I will either (a) respond to them in a meaningful way about their issue or (b) pass it along to the person they should be dealing with, in this case the Casinomeister himself. For that matter the Casinomeister has every reason to expect the same. It's an issue of basic competency for company representatives to be able to respond to incoming issues with a simple "sorry, I'm not the person you should be talking to about this, let me direct you to ...". What isn't acceptable -- to any of the parties concerned -- would be for me to say "Yeah, we'll get back to you" and then toss the issue in the trash. Or to say nothing at all. That would be a fundamental break-down in the way business was being handled and no one inside or outside the organisation should be satisfied with that level of service from company officers.

The rep says everything is good now, the B issue resolved and so forth, and that's great. 45 days is not, IMO, an unreasonable time to test that to see if further problems of this nature occur.
 
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Ok, no further issues and the time has pretty much expired so marking this one as Withdrawn and archiving it.
 

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