Bonus and Winnings

I recently joined Jackpot247 and was given a 200% Welcome Bonus and a £15.00 New Player Bonus. With my original deposit of £200.00 this meant I had a balance of £615.00.

Obviously I knew that there would be Terms and Conditions to abide by so I read these and familiarised myself with what I had to do. So, there was the 'Wagering Requirement' to fulfill (which I completed) and 'minimal risk wagering' which I had to avoid. The problem here is that there is no specific explanation of what 'minimal risk wagering' is – the definition seems deliberately loose and as they say that they will judge if a player has used 'minimal risk wagering' on 'a case by case' basis they allow themselves the opportunity to do whatever they want if, heaven forbid, you actually win!!

So after a couple of weeks of play (including a few days where my account was frozen while they mucked around confirming my ID despite several emails from me with the information they requested) I was fortunate enough to have £1,800.00 in my account. At this stage I requested a withdrawal of £500.00 and continued play so that I ended with an account balance of an even £1,600.00. This meant that in all my total account balance was £2,100.00.

I then received an email from their support department informing me that the withdrawal had been cancelled and my account balance had been returned to my original £200.00 deposit (although they still had £400.00 in my bonus account). This was due, they said, to me having infringed the rules on 'minimal risk wagering'. Following is the email I sent in response:

"Dear Sir/Madam,

I have just received an email from yourselves informing me that you have rejected the £500.00 withdrawal request from my Online Casino Account. The explanation given in the email was that 'you did not comply with our bonus policy by partaking in minimal risk wagering tactics.

Your Terms and Conditions state: Jackpot247 reserves the right to void any amount in excess of the player's original deposit from a player's withdrawal if minimal risk tactics were used.' Furthermore, on logging in to my account I discover that the Cash Balance (which as of this morning was £1,600.00) has now reduced to my original deposit of £200.00.

Reading your Bonus Terms and Conditions I understand that 'minimal risk wagering' is an infraction of the rules and this is the relevant section: 'All variants of roulette games also contribute 100% towards requirements with the exception of any minimal risk wagering such as even money outside bets or any other bet placements designed to cover the majority of numbers on the roulette wheel in order to reduce the risk of the wager.'

I understand that this rule is in place to prevent players from placing considerable 'low risk' bets in order to quickly reach the Wagering Requirements for the bonus concerned.

However, I wouldn't consider my betting patterns to contravene these rules. As you know from your records, I only play Roulette on your site and my usual betting pattern involves a grand total of £8.50 in bets – hardly I would have thought an excessive figure. With this bet I don't cover 11 of the numbers (including 0) at all and, of the remaining numbers, 20 result in a 50p return, 4 in a £9.50 return and 2 in a £18.50 return. As you can hopefully see from this bald assessment it hardly constitutes 'minimal risk wagering'.

I also don't usually include 'outside bets' ('Red' or 'Black' for example), however, there may be occasions when I include these bets, usually when there has been a run of Reds or Blacks, Odds or Evens, or when a particular number or sequence hasn't appeared for a time, but I would simply consider this 'good' Roulette play. I have played this way in many casinos (both online and 'real world') without any issue, probably because on most occasions the 'house advantage' still holds – as it does, incidentally, in all my betting on Jackpot247 – and I end up not winning anything (but having a good time!!).

Overall this stinks of you being unwilling to pay out when on one of those rare occasions one of your players has a run of good luck and actually wins. Please could someone get back to me as soon as possible on this and, hopefully, re-instate my Cash Balance and authorise my withdrawal."

Subsequent to this I chatted online with one of their support people and was told that most of my bets broke whatever unspecified rule they use for 'minimal risk wagering'. Not being a particularly experienced online gambler (though I used to visit Casinos quite a lot some years ago) I have no real idea what 'minimal risk wagering actually is and the definitions I've found online vary widely. And this is my problem ... it seems so arbitrary and up to me whether the bets are legitimate or not. And you're only told when you try to withdraw funds and not while you're playing to stop you simply wasting your time.

I genuinely was simply playing roulette – at no stage did I deliberately set out to use tactics simply to get the free bonuses. Even so, I can sort of understand the bonuses being forfeited but to have £1,500.00 legitimate winnings removed as well seems like theft.