In a world where the search engine is king, and online marketing is rife with experts and pay to play rankings, it can be incredibly difficult to find what you want online.
The first pages of Google et al are swamped with massive companies who have bought their way to the top of the rankings, and not only that, but when you do find a company or business you like the look of you have no way to know how good they are.
Sure, their opening blurb says they are amazing, and everything on the website is presented attractively, but what if customer service sucks? What if the products are much lower in quality than they appear? What if the company is run by cowboys?
It’s the same for online casinos.
There are so many of them, with new ones popping up each month to compete with the big online casinos that seem to have been around forever.
How are you supposed to know which ones are any good and which ones are not?
This is where review sites like Trustpilot come in.
They allow anyone to write a review of a business based on their own personal experience, give it an overall score based on all individual reviews, and thus that business’s reputation can be judged fairly and proportionally. That’s the idea anyway.
Obviously then, companies see their Trustpilot score and the reviews on the site as very very important to their chances of winning new customers – and this is the issue.
When companies need good press, they can come up with some ‘interesting’ ways of getting it.
There are some review sites that are actually affiliates of the casinos themselves, so they are a third-party marketing service in effect (this site is one of them), but we aren’t focussing on them. We are just looking at those like Trustpilot which are simply platforms for other people’s views, and thus can feel more neutral and trustworthy.
However, this feeling can be deceiving.
Before we get into the specifics of casinos on review sites though, let’s bring everyone up to speed on what Trustpilot and other sites like it actually are and how they work.
If you are already familiar with them then you can skip this next section.
What is Trustpilot and How Does it Work?
Trustpilot is an online review platform that allows consumers to share their experiences and opinions about various businesses they have used.
It’s a bit like an online review community where people can write and read reviews of companies they have dealt with or are thinking about using.
The idea is for the site to provide transparency and accountability in the marketplace by enabling customers to make informed decisions based on the experiences of others – a bit like taking recommendations from a friend.
In an ideal world, this is how Trustpilot and sites like it work:
- Review Submission – Any individual can submit a review on Trustpilot. After creating an account, they can rate a company on a scale of one to five stars and then provide written feedback with more detail. Some of them are a few sentences, others go on for ages, it depends on the person writing the review.
- Moderation – Trustpilot employs a moderation system to ensure the reliability and authenticity of reviews. Their moderation AI and/or human team checks each review to ensure it adheres to Trustpilot’s guidelines (more on this soon). They review the content to identify any violations, such as hate speech, defamation, or spam. Additionally, they may verify whether the reviewer had a genuine experience with the business in question, but this is relatively rare.
- TrustScore – Trustpilot assigns a TrustScore to each company based on the aggregate ratings and reviews it receives; so it might say 3.9 out of 5 stars, for example. The TrustScore is displayed alongside the company’s name and serves as an instant overall indicator of customer satisfaction. Trustpilot’s algorithm calculates the TrustScore, taking into account factors such as the number of reviews, the recency of reviews, and the ratings provided.
This is how it works in a nutshell, but business owners can also respond to reviews, or even ask for confirmation of the reviewer’s dealings with them if the review is bad. They can also send invites to customers to submit reviews in order to build their score, and customers can ‘follow’ businesses they like.
There are terms and guidelines everyone is supposed to follow, but as with any online business that has grown to the size of Trustpilot, it’s difficult to police.
There are over 893,000 business on the site, with more than 213 million reviews, and therein lies the problem.
Why Would a Casino Player Want to Write a Review?
Online Casinos are no different to any other business when it comes to online review sites, so if they have been around for a year or two there are usually at least a handful of reviews to be found.
What you will probably notice though, is that they either have a very low score and therefore appear untrustworthy, or they have reviews which score them at completely opposite ends of the scale. Rarely will you find mostly fair, honest reviews all grouped around the same sort of score.
Why is this?
There are two (maybe two and a half) reasons why someone writes an online review of a casino:
- They are angry/disappointed/bitter etc. and want to vent or seek revenge on the company for some perceived ill treatment.
- They are so utterly delighted with the service they have received that they want to do a good deed for the day.
- This is the ‘half’ – They are slightly less delighted but nevertheless happy with the service, and the company has personally requested that they write a short review and included a link for them to do so.
Reason number 1 is much more common than reason number 2 or 3.
This is when the review score trends for casinos on Trustpilot start to make a little more sense.
So let’s look first at the issue with overly negative reviews.
Negative Casino Reviews
As already explained, people are much more likely to leave negative reviews than positive ones, and with an industry like gambling, you tend to find a lot of people who have had a disappointing experience – no one likes losing, right?
Well, not everyone was born with a smart head on their shoulders, and if there is anywhere this couldn’t be more evident, it’s in negative Trustpilot reviews.
A site with 8 terrible reviews and 2 positive reviews will have a really bad overall score, but you have to look at what the reviews say to get the full picture.
We have seen 1-star reviews absolutely slating a casino for obeying the law:
“They wouldn’t let me sign up because I couldn’t provide ID”
Another complained about rigged games (you can read about how this is not possible here) and was very fond of exclamation marks:
“Spent hundreds and haven’t received a single bonus on any single game! Absolute scammers. This isn’t random what so ever! You don’t spend hundreds on a fruit machine in a shop and not receive a single bonus! All fixed RTP gameplay!”
Other reasons include… not winning:
“Deposited £20 and lost the lot in about 10 minutes. Not worth it.”
Hardly fair on the casinos, right?
If those other two reviews were a 4-star and a 5-star, but the 8 terrible reviews all came with comments like those above, would that be an accurate impression of the casino? Not at all, the bad reviews are written by people who either don’t understand the law or how online slots work, or who take no personal responsibility for themselves.
Equally though, there are some online casinos that truly are appalling and have lots of genuine negative reviews. By Trustpilot’s scoring system though, the genuinely bad casinos would have a similar overall score to the casinos who have been hit with unfair negative reviews.
How do you know the truth behind the scores without reading all of the reviews in full? You don’t. So read the reviews in full is the answer, right?
Betfred had just shy of 5,000 reviews on Trustpilot in 2023, William Hill had the same; do you have the time or inclination to read them all? Because we don’t.
So negative reviews often can’t be taken at face value, but what about the positive ones?
Positive Casino Reviews
People do leave genuine positive reviews for online casinos, especially at the bigger brands, but they are much rarer.
So why might you see a site with many many 1-star and 5-star reviews, but so few scores in between?
Well, sad to say, sometimes online casinos have been guilty of buying fake positive reviews.
This was a problem for Trustpilot in many industries, not just online gambling – they even took one repeat offender in the legal services industry to court – but it certainly occurs a lot with online casinos.
This pushes up the number of positive reviews, balancing out the overall score, but does not eliminate the negative ones (genuine or not), so you end up with the situation described above.
A negative review from someone who is just a bit dim is easy enough to spot, but a fake positive review can be trickier to identify.
One good tip to help, is that you can see how many reviews a person has written and you can look at their previous reviews too. So if they have reviewed other businesses outside of gambling that’s a good sign, but if that glowing 5 star review for CryptoCasino.BTC is their only review ever, it’s less likely to be genuine.
Fake reviews quite often talk about winning lots of money too, either directly:
“It took me a while but I finally won a huge jackpot”
Or indirectly:
“Deposited £200, played a few games, then made a withdrawal for £2400 and it was in my account in a few hours.”
Another red flag is a review that is vague or generic:
“I always liked this casino and play here often. The games are out of this world and the withdrawal times are like lightning. What can I say about the customer service? They are just the best and I would recommend to everyone, plus amazing promotions that are the icing on the cake.”
Statements like that combined with a reviewer who has not reviewed anything else should get your spidey senses tingling.
Reviewers can verify themselves, which means they have sent in photo ID, and their reviews can usually be trusted. However, do not confuse a verified reviewer with a verified review – which is simply a review written by someone who was directly invited to do so by the company.
What’s more, some online casino sites have been known to offer rewards such as bonus cash or free spins for leaving a positive review, so even if everything does seem to stack up… you can never know 100%.
See, told you it was tricky.
Why Trustpilot and Review Sites are not a Good Guide for Choosing an Online Casino
As you can hopefully already tell, these sorts of sites are flawed because people can leave unfair negative reviews as well as fake positive reviews, so the overall score becomes meaningless.
You can’t trust the reviews when they are good and nor can you trust them when they are bad.
Fake reviews are an accepted problem on all review sites, but Trustpilot is the most well-known, and in 2021 a team of almost 100 employees removed more than 2.7 million fake reviews from the site. Customers can report suspected fake reviews too, and the site receives around 9,000 of these requests every single month, which gives you some idea of how big the problem is.
A business can sign up to Trustpilot on a paid subscription and take a more active role in managing the reviews people post about them, but it’s very expensive especially for small businesses, which many new online casinos are.
Even for a larger brand that could afford it, it’s a huge hassle to have to report suspicious reviews and then go through the process of investigating them, sending supporting evidence, and proving their validity or otherwise.
For smaller companies it is worse though, because they either have to leave their reputation unjustly in ruins, or spend a fortune to manage something that they never asked to be involved with in the first place.
The review platform therefore fails on both fronts; it leaves the players confused and none-the-wiser, and the casinos unfairly represented or out of pocket.
So How do we Know Which Online Casino Sites to Trust?
The best idea is just to try them using a sign-up offer and see what you think. Play through a small amount and make a withdrawal, see if it takes too long, contact customer services for any old reason and see how quickly and efficiently they deal with it, that sort of thing.
Of course, make sure the site is properly licensed before you do any of this by checking their gambling license info at the very bottom of the homepage. It’s the tiny small print and should include a link to view their license and company info.
There are many online casino review sites out there too, writing independent reviews of online casinos from personal experience.
This is one of them.
As mentioned earlier, it is also an affiliate site which is why we have a list of sign-up offers for the sites we recommend. Some might say this compromises the integrity of affiliate review sites, which is an understandable opinion, but they are a better alternative to Trustpilot and the like.
We are a very small team, we only review sites we like, we have been around for years, and we have mountains of other content on the site too, so we would hope that builds trust with new readers.
However, rogue affiliate sites definitely do exist, but again, you can usually tell from the content of the reviews how genuine and trustworthy they are. There are even some that deliberately only promote online casinos not on Gamstop, targeting people with gambling problems.
It goes without saying that these should be avoided.
A good affiliate site will not list every casino under the sun, and the reviews will be unique, detailed, and specific rather than generic, short, and bland.
You don’t have to use these either of course, you can just do your own digging and try them out one by one, but if you are going to use reviews to do some research before you dive in, affiliate sites are a much better option than review platforms like Trustpilot.