CAESARS BINGO EATS ERROR ON PROMO


Monday August 15,2011 : US company's UK online enterprise does the right thing.
 
American gambling giant Caesars Entertainment did the right thing this week after Brit punters took advantage of a promotional error on its UK-facing online bingo website CaesarsBingo.com.
 
The manner in which the Gamesys-operated site handled an embarrassing and possibly expensive promotional construction error is in stark contrast to a similar case recently in which Betfair punished the players with confiscation of winnings.
 
The Guardian newspaper reported that the overly generous Caesars promo offered players a 200 percent bonus on deposits maxed at GBP400 and allowed the customers to wager the bonus money while keeping their initial deposit safe.
 
"The error on [the] Caesars bingo website, CaesarsBingo.com, left one family more than GBP3,000 better off before the casino discovered its mistake and corrected the glitch," the Guardian reported, noting that such promos are not unusual in online gambling, but that most are carefully constructed so that punters are likely to break even or lose money.
 
To ensure they do not lose out from such promotions, gambling companies do not usually allow customers to make a withdrawal until they have spent their entire bonus, meaning that customers cannot usually take out more money than they have wagered.
 
Players reportedly flocked to the site to take advantage of the offer.
 
One player said he had collected a total of GBP460 after staking just GBP200. "We stumbled across it by chance," an anonymous punter told the newspaper.  "We told all of our friends and family about it. In total, our family has made more than GBP3,000 from this glitch and one friend paid for his wedding with his winnings."
 
Caesars changed the terms and conditions of the game on Thursday.
 
A spokesman for Caesars Interactive said: "If [gamblers] are taking advantage of something that is our error they will get to keep the advantage."
 
However, he cautioned that if there was any suggestion of fraudulent play, this would become an issue, and revealed that several player accounts suspected of questionable activity were being investigated.
 
CaesarsBingo.com launched in the UK last year, and is operated by Gamesys, a respected British online gambling group which takes bets worth more than GBP billion a year.