Gambling Commission Reviews 

WHAT COMMISION? YOU MEAN THE CASINOS THEY WORK FOR? this service is not there to help people if thats what you think...they are a legal loophole to allow online casinos to do as they will...its a bit like phoning your bank to tell them you are going to rob them.... going to the bank and wondering how you got caught robbing the bank...the only thing the Gamble commission does is ask you to give a heads up to the company you have a problem with to give them, the heads up to block you ban do and remove any evidence.... the money they must be making in payments from casinos must be huge.....makes perfect sense tho.. casinos cant lose all they have to do is join the ukgc pay them a fee to be legally covered and then watch as they rob cheat and steal from the public with the blessing of the commision... good business model realy

I would like to put an official complaint against GAMBLII ….. I received new sign up 350% welcome bonus for depositing 25.00 euro/pound !!!! I thought that sounds great!!!!! DIDNT receive anything at all… thought maybe I did something wrong??? Stupidly went on to deposit 2x thinking i would receive my bonuses!!!!!! WRONG …. 🤔
Emailed to ask for help hahahaha what a joke….. I was insulted by this casino/ RE; I was told I hadn’t deposited in the correct manner and therefore I certainly wasn’t entitled to any bonus of any kind!!!! And to add insult to injury- I was told that if I wasn’t happy with the service then i shouldn’t have deposited again!!!!!!! WOW 😮 I was made to feel like an idiot, stupid … infact down right bloody rude to go with it!!!!!!! DISGRACE that this dodgy site is allowed to con people like they do

Lynn Light

I don't normally write a review but this was awful, I joined betfred for 2 days to pass some time whilst I was recovering from hospital treatment, I was playing a live game show for most of the day, betting 20p stakes and was £70 in profit, suddenly I get a call from the gambling commission, I explained that I use auto bets and fall asleep sometimes due to my recovery, they turned around and said that auto play doesn't exist, after trying desperately to educate them they accused me of lying, spoke to betfred and they told the gambling commission that they were wrong and auto play was available. Instead of admitting they were wrong they closed down my account in spite. These people are not well trained and have no clue what betting sites provide or what a gambling problem is. If you are in profit after gambling for 1 day you don't have a problem lol. So if you are unfortunate to come across these people just hang up and join another site because they have no clue what they are supposed to be doing.

Probably getting back handers from gambling sites to let them do what they want

I came to this site to see if The Gambling Commission had investigated the abysmal service of Unibet, which has a string of complaints about its treatment of punters.
Oh dear! Unibet is as unreliable as this outfit.
It’s unbelievable that a Government appointed body could treat genuine complaints with such contempt.
The members of this Commission are a disgrace and if we had a Government that cared about punters it would have replaced these ineffective members some time ago.

What is it you actually do? We the punters are getting fleeced consistently, we win some money, try to withdraw. Documents required. Even you have stated they can't do this, buts it ok for us to deposit and play and loose our money without providing documents. You are in cahoots with the bookies, you don't enforce your own rules and fine them and put it in your pockets while we the punters get fleeced. Shame on you. Either do your job or find someone else willing to do it. We the punters should take this to the highest level we can, unacceptable. They should be protecting us and making sure we are treated fairly. Shame on gambling commission but remember, your greedy and criminal behaviour will only be tolerated for soo long before we do something about it.

What is the purpose of the GC? I bet they don’t really know. They would say to protect vulnerable people.Okay so let’s break that response down. As many have said why are you not making online bookmakers validate customer before they are able to bet? What is the definition of a vulnerable person and why are bookmakers blocking withdrawals and essential stealing the winnings. What are you doing about that? Has it ever occurred to the GC, that gamblers use many online bookmakers in the quest to obtain the best odds. Unless ALL online and shop bookmakers are sharing customer information and spend, this will fail. It would also breach GDPR if it was achieved. Does the GC understand that someone on minimum wage or who is in receipt of benefits could lose £20 and that may be significant but a well paid business person could lose £1000 many times over and it would make a difference one jot to him or her.

You appear to be targeting the people who can afford to gamble. If you were serious you would make it mandatory for all new customers to declare their income and answer a series of questions regarding problem gambling. If they pass whether by answering the questions truthfully, exaggerating or deliberately lying, at least the bookmaker can say he acted responsibly. Verify UK addresses etc. using soft search via bonafide credit reference agency. Uk Bookmakers operate worldwide and they are using the guidelines to enforce on non-uk persons. Why?

If the GC were deadly serious they need to get off their bottoms and visit bookmaker shops in industrial towns nationwide and study the problem Joe feeding FOBTS and betting on virtual racing.

You need to ask the person to change, if not the us the punters will change the person.

What a useless government department this is . You can't even complain to them about scam websites . Like all government departments they are lazy and totally inept . They don't protect anyone and are a total.waste of time . Try doing something for a change you lazy Muppets .

Please explain and show proof what is it you are regulating. How on earth are UK bookies allowing you to sign up, deposit, win a little money then suspended your account asking for documents. This is against your own regulations but they are not enforced. You should be asking for documents when registering and before you deposit. You talk all this nonsense about problem gamblers but we the punters are getting ROBBED. Look at the review from all UK bookies sites. You don't listen to us the customers. We are blatantly getting fleeced and you do nothing. You fine a company, but where do you reinvest it because you are not upholding the regulations correctly. You work for us the customers, without us you would not exist. If you do not fix this problem many people will go over to the black market.
Ps. You want to see how much gambling commiaoj cares about us the punters. Just look at the last time they replied to a review. We have to to better, we the customers must enforce them to uphold the regulations otherwise we will simply get fleeced every time we play.

Disgusting despicable outright scandal you don’t even exist how come I don’t have to give any documents to sign up but when I withdraw I am bombarded with questions about whether I can afford to spend the money that’s been spent maybe they should provide their bank statements to show whether they can pay if I win doesn’t make sense what comes to my mind is LEGAL ROBBERY

I have contacted UKGC on several occasions over the last 2-3 years, either to ask for their opinion on whether a casino's actions are a breach of their licensing conditions, or to report a casino's misconduct where it is clear that a breach of licence has occurred.
The most common complaint against online casinos is that they refuse to pay out winnings or seek to delay the payout of winnings by mandating that the user provide additional documents only after a withdrawal is requested. Casinos often excuse this behaviour by claiming that this is required by their UKGC licence, or by other regulations.
About 1 year ago, I began a dialogue with UKGC over the meaning of licensing condition 17, which states "A request made by a customer to withdraw funds from their account must not result in a requirement for additional information to be supplied as a condition of withdrawal if the licensee could have reasonably requested that information earlier. This requirement does not prevent a licensee from seeking information on the customer which they must obtain at that time due to any other legal obligation."
The first sentence is pretty clear, and clarifying guidance was published which explained that whilst casinos can continue to request information from customers at the time of a withdrawal, the processing of the withdrawal should not be held up until the customer complies.

I completely understand that the UKGC is not positioned to take up complaints on behalf of individual customers. I was asking them to act against a casino on my behalf, but was rather suggesting that this supposedly-banned practice was so prevalent that UKGC should consider publishing even clearer guidance on the circumstances under which a casino could refuse to pay a customer, pending delivery of documentation. I initially gave them 2 specific, recent examples of such experiences of this behaviour. I was disappointed with their lacklustre response and so over the following several months, I continued to send detailed examples and evidence, every time a new casino had withheld payment until I provided documents that they had only requested after I had tried to withdraw the money. I sent 8-10 examples of this, each for a different casino, and yet UKGC refuses recognise the extent of the problem, or to comment on whether the specific behaviours I reported in each case are permitted by their standard licensing conditions.

The other common subject about which I have sought the advice of UKGC and reported issues with specific casinos also relates to documents. UKGC has been imposing increasingly strict requirements on online casinos, regarding both Responsible Gambling and Anti-Money Laundering (AML), the result of which has been that casinos now insist that customers comply with increasingly intrusive requests for sensitive documents. It is unclear from where UKGC derives the power effectively to mandate that consumers make such extensive financial disclosures as a prerequisite to gamble online, but it has become common practice for casinos to cite UKGC requirements as justification for requesting: passport/driving licence, proof of address, proof of ID (selfie holding your own passport), photos of debit cards, 3 months of payslips, 3 months of bank statements, evidence of savings/investments, etc, etc. These are precisely the documents that you have to provide to take out a bank loan or a credit card; they are precisely those documents which are most valuable to anyone wishing to commit identity fraud. However, UKGC issues no specific obligations or even guidance as to how casinos acquire this information and many casinos provide no secure mechanisms via which consumers can provide these documents, instead insisting that they are delivered by unencrypted email, which is simply an insufficiently secure means of providing such sensitive documents. UKGC has created a process that has resulted in the the broad dissemination of consumers' most sensitive data/documents to (mostly) nascent organisations that do not have the knowledge, experience or (let's be honest) interest in making the investments necessary to implement the level of security that such documents deserve. I have raised with UKGC, who do not regard this as their responsibility and defer to other agencies for such concerns.

Please don't waste your time contacting them. Regardless of what it is about they will make you wait weeks to reply and then tell you in a copy and paste message they can't help. It's impossible to have a conversation via email either as takes 5 weeks to get a reply each time

They have no interest, I tried to tell them bookies were using the responsible gambling guidelines as a reason to gub accounts and of course they didn't want to know.

This is the commission lest we forget that let's bookmakers ask for ridiculous invasive paper work and wage slips.

This company does not support consumers but they protect bookmakers for the simple fact that they allow bookmakers to take 100% of your money on the slots and if you get a win it is less then the stake. More people have committed suicide since they have been in charge of monitoring bookmakers but they will never support the punter if they did there is no way bookmakers could get away with the unfairness they show to customers, if they look at the reviews about Ladbrokes and see that they are mainly on about the slots, if they are there for the protection of the consumer then Ladbrokes would be investigated to find out why their slots are taking 100% of your money. Them must wake up each day and bet how many people have killed themselves shame on the management, so remember they are not there for you but there for the bookmaker. If they put money on the slots and they lose 100% then they might do the right think and protect the punter.

Close gambling commission now.I will take over.Beware all sites.government should employ me to implement regulations.

I am sick of bookmakers demanding lots of my personal information, when I ask why they say its the Gambling Commission regulations. I just wish they would keep their nose out of people's personal business. It's not their concern how much people bet

Any company that doesn't let you reply to their tweets doesn't like being questioned. They think they know best and operate without being help accountable. What do they all day? It's not replying to emails or tweets

I can't say I'm surprised they don't reply on here

I genuinely wonder what these absolute crooks do! They’ve let William Hill absolutely scam their customers out of money due to the fact they couldn’t comply with the system and fined 19 million pound and who forfeits that 19 million pound loss…THE CUSTOMER. They rig their slots so that the payout are next to nothing it’s continuous dead spins pitiful paylines and where are these muppets when it needs to be checked? Sat there with the thumbs up their a*ses taking back hands to allow this sh**t to happen! If I was to send over the last 3 months of gameplay that I have now had to start recording due to the fact William Hill/888 are just point blank robbing us blind then maybe they’d open their eyes the useless frauds!

HAHAHAHAHA THAT MAKES ME LAUGH. ALL THESE PEOPLE MOANING I CANT STOP LAUGHING...DO YOU SERIOUSLY THINK THERE IS SOMEBODY BEHIND THE GAMBLING COMMISSION? HAHAHAHAHA!!! DON'T YOU THINK IT'S A BIT PECULIAR THERE IS NOT BEEN AN ANSWER FOR YEARS? HAHAHAHAHA. THEY ARE TAKING YOUR MONEY BY THE SECOND AND I CANT BELIEVE YOU ARE FALLING IN THE TRAP. HAHAHAHAHA.
KEEP COMPLAINING, IT WONT DISTURB THEIR PINA COLADA...BUNCH OF TARTS

I have said for long time that nobody governs the bookies and that they have no accountability. You have to be brain dead not to see the blatant cheating because no questions is asked of them. Try complaining and they throw Gambling Commission at you so quick you get dizzy. I was just on Gambling Commission website for quick read and the only recommendation on their site the bookies follows is not charging you for transfers and it's very obvious why that is. Reviews on here about Gambling Commission says it all. Crazy.

Embarrassing. Post on twitter that they want people's views. Then as usual they turn off replies do no one can comment. I've never known such an organisation that does what it pleases and doesn't answer to anyone. They're a dreadful company who are extremely arrogant and unhelpful

MPs (e.g. Iain Duncan Smith and Gambling APPG) and UKGB take note ! This is what Matchbook is doing either because of your rules/laws, or they are doing it themself.

1.
1 year inactivity fee (£5 a month until all funds have been taken, then it miraculously stops)
2.
All customers must have a photo driving licence or passport ? (unless you are a loser ?)

If you have funds in your account and don't use account for a year, they will lock the account and start taking £5 a month until it's empty.
You can re-open the account by simply having a Drivers licence (photo) or Passport, and give them copies. If you don't have these ... tough.

Here's some replies I got (probably standard replies) .. UKGC take note !!!
......
We wanted to let you know that your account has been inactive for a period of 12 months or more. Thirty days from now, your account will begin to incur an inactivity fee of £5 per month. When the balance in your account reaches zero, the fees will stop.

If you have an active payment method linked to your account, we will attempt to refund your balance before this. To reactivate your account, simply login to Matchbook.com or through the mobile app. From there, you can continue to use the site or withdraw your remaining balance.

If your balance goes under the minimum withdrawal amount of £10, you will need to make a minimum deposit and then withdraw that amount plus your remaining balance.
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Unfortunately, it would not be possible to transfer the money to your account without you verifying the account. This would breach our terms and conditions and we are obliged to comply with the legal requirements set out by the UKGC.

To verify your account, we require:

•A valid photo ID (Drivers Licence or Biometric Passport in jpeg format) - front and back

•Proof of address dated in the last 3 months (e.g. utility bill, bank statement, official government letter) - Mobile phone bills are not accepted.

With regard to the requested account closure, we can close the account for you once you have verified. The account will remain suspended until verification is complete.
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All customers need to verify after a specific time after registering. Your funds are safe however due to an inactive fee Matchbook will charge £5 per month.
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This is standard practice for any reputable gaming business. In order for us to comply with legal requirements it is necessary to verify personal details submitted to us upon registration of Matchbook accounts.