Pirated Casino Games: why so dangerous?

In recent days the entire community of players, portals and operators have been witnesses to a real escalation of frauds catches (because of frauds we are talking about , let's face it) above all regarding the piracy of games, especially slots, belonging to well-known vendors such as NetEnt and Novomatic. 

The dangerous and pernicious practice of serving bogus games has been unmasked firstly by LatestCasinoBonuses guys, a well known and reputable portal. We too have bothered to check some "suspicious" casinos in our database and we found some good (?) stuffs... just take a look on the last news on this blog.

So, why a pirated/fake game is so dangerous?

​The answer is simple and obvious: a pirated game that isn't hosted on its natural server (vendors' server, example NetEnt) is completely unlinked from the system. This makes impossible for vendors to control the flow of bets, settings, winnings and losses, jackpots flows (if the game is a progressive one). Pretty awful, isn't it?

Each vendors have specific settings for each game. So, if a game is completely pirated and hosted on a private server, they can do whatever they want in order to alter the game behavior. Just think if they could (and probably they do) alter the RTP (Return to Player) percentage. The RTP is a theoretical statistical number (very common in the community of slots players) that gives a summary indication on what amount a player will get in return for all bets in a specific game in the long run. The higher is this percentage, the more the player is supposed to win during a betting session. Let's now think if they could (and, again, probably they do) set to "0" (zero) this theoretical percentage through some tricks: practically sure loss as sure is the night and day cycle. Awful, simply awful.

Not to mentions progressive games, linked to a progressive jackpot network (NetEnt has a lot of progressive slots such as Hall of Gods or Arabian Nighs). Let's suppose you hit the jackpot: who pays the winnings? How? How can be this "hit value" scaled down from the total of the network if the game is unlinked from it? Last but not last: will you be really able to hit the jackpot? Who writes has a lot of doubts. Indeed, a lot of certainties.

We have had many reports on anomalous behaviors of these slots then proved fake: betting sessions sudden interruptions, jackpots progress anomalies, strange sounds, strange artifacts on screen during spins, huge (and abnormal) amount of free spins sessions without winnings and so on.

Soon we'll post a handy guide on how to recognize, catch and/or identify fake games.

How do they serve pirated games

The techniques they use are still under investigation. From what we could understand and from what we catched in the past days (references here and here) they managed to do a sort of "reverse engineering" of the games, downloading them on their own servers (without any right or license) and then serve them to unsuspecting players on their respective casinos. We are currently still investigating and will keep you updated on the matter.

In the meantime, if you have any doubt or suspicion don't esitate to contact us. You can get in touch with us using the "Contact Us" form on the footer or you can leave a comment here or you can contact us through our Facebook page. Or you can post a review in a casino, as you prefer. But please (and this is extremely important!), don't get caught by "the psychosis of the fake game". Not all casinos are fake and not all casinos are born to steal your money. Luckily it's only a small percentage and we are here, FreeExtraChips exists only for that: to provide all possible informations on where to play and where not .