7 Jan

Safe Pokies in Australia — Australian Compatible Pokies

These days the world of online gambling is very tightly regulated, licensed and audited, and providing that you pay close attention to the sites that you use, then you should be okay. There are many that have slipped through the net though, and many that continue to do so.

They are sites like E Casino and Lock Poker, ones that seemed legit to begin with, but then simply stopped paying players their winnings. These sites are often hard to spot, but if you check to make sure that they use something like eCOGRA, which acts as a middleman between players and the casino when disputes are raised, then you are halfway there. These two sites very subtle, and by all accounts they were fully legit for a time, but that didn’t last long. Chances are that they fell on hard times, but rather than letting their customers know and then working through it, they simply used their customers’ money to get them through.

Sites that were less subtle and never legit (at least as far as we can tell) include Winaday and Slotland, who used false odds for their jackpot wins, meaning they weren’t really achievable at all. If you’re thinking that this doesn’t sound that bad, then you’re not thinking hard enough. If sites can openly lie and misguide their customers when it comes to jackpots (which, let’s be honest, is what attracts most players to begin with) then you have to ask yourself what else they are capable of.

There are also top names that have found their way onto “Blacklists” and “Rogue Lists”, including Betfair, the biggest betting exchange in the world. Betfair also have an online casino that uses the Playtech software, and by all accounts this should be avoided. Not only has this received an endless amount of bad reviews, but it is also on casinomeister.com’s Rogue List. Big sites can take liberties, especially in the case of sites that found their fame doing something else and then branched out into online casinos, such as Betfair. Others include BetFred, who were involved in a scandal a while back concerning the Finsoft/Spielo G2 software.

After all the doom and gloom, we should remind you that there are good, safe and legitimate sites out there. Sites that are audited, sites that are licensed, sites that do use eCOGRA and sites that do pay out, and one of the best ones out there is Euro Palace. In fact, Euro Palace belongs to a wider group of online casinos known as the Fortune Lounge Group, and this also includes Royal Vegas Casino and Platinum Play, among others. These casinos not only benefit from highly licensed and regulated software and banking, but they have all been established for a very long time and have never had any questions over their legitimacy.

Euro Palace, and all of the Fortune Lounge casinos for that matter, are open to players from Australia, and it also has a fantastic deposit bonus and loyalty scheme, paying big to loyal players, regardless of their stake. As we mentioned above, the use of eCOGRA also means that should anything happen, you will be covered and you will receive help with any dispute that you file.

Euro Palace has a wealth of slot machines: from video poker to reel slots, fruit slots and more. These include the latest games, such as Game of Thrones and Terminator 2, along with some classics like Mega Moolah (which comes with a progressive jackpot that often exceeds $1 million) and some new classics like the Playboy pokie. If you get bored of pokies, then Euro Palace also has plenty of scratch cards, from simple ones that rival the sort you can buy at your local shop, to full-featured ones that rival your favorite pokie. They also have stacks of table games. In fact, the only thing that lets Euro Palace down is the fact that you can’t use it to gamble on sports or to play poker, but sports fans can still find something to sate their appetite in games such as Football Star, whist poker fans can try the many video poker games.

There are a lot of bad sites out there — the history of online gambling is littered with them — but if you want a name you can trust and a brand that never fails, then you can’t go wrong with Fortune Lounge and Euro Palace.