Royal Vegas: a very unfortunate denouement

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Royal Vegas: a very unfortunate denouement

December 10th, 2013

This is a follow up to the previous Royal Vegas article, regarding a complaint posted about winnings illegitimately confiscated by Fortune Lounge group member Royal Vegas, and which ended with this rude warning from one of the site administrators after the player requested an update:

Post again before the PAB (**complaint**) is done and your PAB is toast.

Such an aggressive attitude didn't bode well, and things turned out accordingly.

After no apparent resolution to the matter or contact with the mediator after three weeks, the player lost patience and requested an update. There followed the expected response:

Game over: your PAB is toast, though I will send you a final email regarding your case.

Indeed, game over: the player's complaint was dropped, not because of any irregularities within the complaint itself, but because a frustrated player finally broke his silence and requested an update.

For good measure, the player was also banned from the site.

At this point, with the player banned and unable to reply, the nature of the accusations seemed to change direction; this from site owner Bryan "Casinomeister" Bailey:

You should know full well what was going on. We have an extensive reply from the casino rep that describes in detail your activity at the FL casinos and which terms you broke. You received your deposit back, yes? Quit your whining. you knew exactly what you were doing.

Next time, don't collude with other players and you shouldn't have any issues.

This is now very confusing. The allegation was "irregular betting", not "collusion". If "collusion" was the issue, why was it never mentioned? And what exactly is "collusion" anyway? Is it multiple accounts? If so, why not say so? - this is a very standard reason given for non-payment.

A subsequent comment didn't offer any clarification:

Her account is associated with 40+ other accounts. That's all I'm going to say in the matter.

Right, so back to the main point: if this was an issue, why was it never given as such when it should have been, at the outset?

And what is "collusion"? We are no clearer.

The remaining comments from the two forum administrators were rude and patronising.

The player subsequently posted a the final reply he received from Drayman, the Casinomeister complaint handler, on the Beating Bonuses forum:

Given your disregard for our PAB process I respectfully ask that you take any future casino complaints you may have somewhere else: you may consider the PAB process closed to you.

FYI the casino has shown that you have violated their Terms & Conditions regarding bonus abuse. Furthermore they have good reason to believe you are working with other players to do so.

While I may not like those Terms the fact is that you agreed to them and you broke them. I believe the casino has correctly identified you as a Terms violator and as such I believe their actions against you are justified.

So after having had the complaint rejected for posting an update request, we're told that the complaint was also rejected because of "bonus abuse", which evidently relates to the "irregular betting" cited initially by the casino and which we were aware of - a clause specifically ruled as unacceptable in the Casinomeister rules themselves and as such a seemingly quite ridiculous and patently self-contradictory position to take; and also we have the vaguely-worded reference to "working with others", which is what was mentioned as "collusion" after the player was banned.

I do not find this resolution credible. If there had been issues of multiple accounts the casino would have stated them at the beginning, as they are a reasonable, if almost invariably unverifiable, reason for confiscations. They did not do so, and we can reject them as bogus accordingly. Undefined "irregular betting" (the "bonus abuse" of the above letter) is also not a reasonable excuse for confiscating winnings, and as noted above it is not apparently considered acceptable by even the site itself which now cites it as reasonable - extraordinarily.

Interesting to note is that Steve Russo of the Gambling Grumbles complaint service has an altogether different opinion of Fortune Lounge; at Casinomeister they are "accredited" as the best of the best; at Gambling Grumbles they belong in the "Hall of Shame". Steve has this to say:

Gambling Grumbles is never happy when it receives a complaint about any of the casinos in the Fortune Affiliates (Fortune Lounge) group. We have learned from experience that we cannot help a player there as their casinos refuse to even give us any information, much less to review their decision. Hence, the entire group is in our "Hall of Shame", meaning that when a complaint comes in we do not even waste the time and effort to write to the casino. Instead, we simply post the complaint here.

We can't help Cesar, but we can help others thinking of playing at the Fortune Affiliates (Fortune Lounge) group with one word of advice: "Don't".

Obviously good advice, but the more pressing question is: why was the complaint rejected at Casinomeister? To do so as "punishment" for posting an update request is petty and childish; the allegations of bonus abuse are false as there were no terms' breaches beyond undefined and patently unacceptable "irregular betting"; and the accusation of "collusion", made after the player could no longer defend themselves, is too vague and undefined to be credible.

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Royal Vegas: a very unfortunate denouement

Royal Vegas: a very unfortunate denouement

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