Online Casino Software Developer Caught Rigging Casino Games

This is a major casino news spreading through the online gaming community. This sensational news is about GTech a subsidiary to Lottomatica that was caught rigging two online casino games. The games that were rigged are Reel Deal and Hi/Lo Gambler. These two casino games used a recorded code by GTech and were then distributed to a number of well known online casino operators. Some of the operators that offered these two games were Betfred and Nordicbet.

You can also find a similar version of these two casino games at other online casino platforms but they are then distributed by a different company and works as they should. GTech and their sister company Spielo International is more known as BOSS Media to casino players around the world. These three brands then operate under another company called Lottomatica. BOSS Media is a well-known casino games developer and has been in the business for over 15 years. What BOSS media is most known for however is their Poker Network and they were recommended for an online poker license in Nevada recently.

How did the rigged casino games get discovered

The two casino games, The Reel Deal and Hi/Li Gambler, that were rigged are coin flip games. The way they work is that a player decides what the next card or combination of cards will be and then odds are given according to probability. The two games were advertised that they would pay back 100% to the players. This means that there wouldn´t be any house edge in these two games. However, this was not the case instead they didn´t give any player a fair deal.

One player called Katie91 played both of these games at Betfred. She first tried the play mode and received a fair game and thought that this could be a great way to earn som real money. She started to play with real money and after thousands of hands, she was sure that the game was rigged. She took help of her brother and they went through and analyzed the logs from the game and could then draw the conclusion that Betfred for a fact was offering a rigged game in their online casino.

Katie91 and her brother noticed that the game only gave a 96% payout instead of the 100% that it was promised to have. According to her brother’s research, the chances of this happening in a fair deal due to variance are over 1 in 154 million.

Eliot Jacobson, a well respected fair game advocate, gives the chances that the card distribution was fair at 1 in 1,048,712,149,670,420,000,000,000. In his words, this is the same as receiving four consecutive pat royal flushes on a video poker machine or in Five Card Stud.

Katie91 posted her story and research at a huge casino forum called Casinomeister and after a while, Betfred answers in the thread that has grown every minute. Here is the post made by a Betfred representative:

“Apologies for the delay, but the analysis of significant amounts of data and liaising with multiple suppliers takes time. We have moved as quick as possible without jeopardizing the accuracy of the results, which you will find below.

Realistic Games provided the assets and rights to the Reel Deal game but SPIELO G2 developed the game for their operators and in doing so changed a number of core features. As such, it is not right to identify Realistic Games as responsible for how the game performs.

On developing the game, SPEILO G2 developed two version: fixed odds and fixed price. The latter was in operation at Betfred. Fixed price meant that randomness could be introduced via a certified (GLI and TST approved) RNG and an RTP was introduced. In this case, at 96% RTP.

The development of the game in this way resulted in SPELO G2 inadvertently running the fun version of the game on a fixed odds model and not a fixed price, and therefore it ran at a different RTP.

4.Finally, during the deployment of the game to Betfred the wrong help file was associated with the game and reported the wrong RTP.

Our initial offer of compensation in regard to the help file was made. However, having reviewed the analysis from SPEILO G2 and our own, we accept that Betfred Games has been running two versions of the same game for free and money play respectively and that is simply not acceptable. Based on that we will be refunding all losses on the game from when the game was introduced to Betfred and will be removing other Realistic Games provided by SPIELO G2 to complete a review of their configuration, help files and RTP and until we’re confident in their accuracy.

Compensation payments will be issued within 7 working days.We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to our players and to thank the OP and the Casinomeister forum as a whole for bringing this to our attention. The integrity of our games and operation is of paramount importance to Betfred and value any feedback that strengthens or corrects our operation.Finally, our logs and cooperation will remain open to authorized parties to further any part of this investigation.”

After Betfred’s answer players have directed lots of anger towards them. Most notably, Betfred seems complacent that they offered a game they knew did not deal a fair game. Players are most angry that there can even be a game that doesn´t deal a fair game as a game using cards must use a fair deck. This is standard in all legitimate gaming jurisdictions.

Betfred does not seem concerned that their game did not do this, only that their game did not use the proper help file and was different than their free play game.What also should be said in this post is Betfred is not the only online casino that offered these two casino games. Betfred also removed the games and refunded all players. So did Nordicbet! An interesting thing is that Bet365 stated that they were using the correct paytables and did not receive this game through GTech, therefore they do not feel their version is flawed.

Summary of this situation

This is the first time we have seen a rigged online casino game and it´s very disturbing from a players point of view. Boss Media, Spielo, Gtech, Lottomatica, or whatever you want to call the company has in some way intentionally created a game that was rigged. Maybe they did not test the game before the launch and that’s why this happened or they didn´t understand the gambling laws.

Lottomatica has been silent up to date but we sure hope we will hear something from them in the next days.If they don´t or even if they will you could say that this makes all their games suspect. They also provide one of the largest online poker networks and rigged poker has been up for discussion for many years, maybe this question blows up again after this. These actions by Lottomatica’s subsidiaries sure brings all of their games into question and so does their silence. On the other hand, it´s also annoying to now know that online casinos maybe aren’t testing their games.

Every online casino has reports that shows how much they win on each casino game. They would easily see that this game booked a much higher win than expected as there wasn´t supposed to be any house edge on these games. Since they would have failed to properly test their game to offer the game, to begin with, you would think they would still notice that they were booking huge wins on a game that should break even. The fact that this situation could have been caused by a series of human errors or incompetence by the online casino and Lottomatica should, of course, be considered. It may have been intentional to generate more revenue and it will then be very interesting to see if Lottomatica receives a percentage of the win or a flat fee from the distributed casino games.If they receive a portion of the win then that is just another reason to be concerned about every game that they offer.