Is Online Bingo a Scam, Fixed or Trustworthy?

ScamOnline gaming can provide much fun, excitement, and edge of the seat moments, especially where bingo is concerned. The game has a wonderful history with decades of improvement to build it into the product that we all love today.

However, as with many online based activities, the question of trust and reliability comes up a lot. In a bingo hall you can see the caller drawing the balls with your own eyes, you have the physical bingo card in front of you, and you would know if there was anything untoward going on. Online, however, there could be anything going on behind all of that technical wizardry, right?

Technically that is true, but online bingo played at regulated websites is as fair, safe, and trustworthy as the real thing. Want to know why? Then let’s delve a little deeper into the world behind what you see on your screen, and you will find out that online bingo is nothing to be wary of.

It’s all in the Licence

UKGCBingo, like many other forms of online gaming, can only be offered to gamers if the platform it runs on is fully licensed under the UK Gambling Commission, and the commission was set up by the government. You don’t get much more official than that.

Any platform which does not display details of a license is highly likely to be a scam and should be avoided at all costs, and reported.  Licence details will be listed at the bottom of the home page, so if there are no licence details don’t play with them, and if even if there are you should check them on the UKGC’s website to be sure. Although it goes without saying that any site listed in this website has been thoroughly checked by us.

There are four types of licence condition which can be attached to operating licenses under the Gambling Act 2005. These exist in the forms of both general and individual conditions, conditions imposed by the Secretary of State, and statutory conditions imposed by the Act itself. Such conditions include codes of practice, which are in place to ensure several things, mainly:

•    That gambling is conducted in a fair, honest, and ultimately open way
•    That minors under 18 and other vulnerable groups of people are protected
•    That assistance is made available to people who are, or may be, affected by gambling

These conditions and codes of practice must be adhered to by all licence holders, both new and existing, and failure to do so can result in the Gambling Commission taking action against a site.

The Random Number Generator’s Job

Random Number Generator

Now to address the technical side of things: how do we know that the games are fair and that all players have an equal shot of landing the big prizes?

Well, this is controlled by a random number generator (RNG). The RNG is a complex computerised mechanism that uses algorithms to generate a sequence of numbers or symbols that cannot be predicted better than by random chance.

These are built into all legal online gambling games, from slots, to casino games and right through to bingo, to ensure that no one can know or manipulate what will happen next.

For bingo then, it is the RNG that decides which bingo number to draw next, and this is not based on any of the tickets that have been bought either, it’s as random as it is possible to get.

Testing

eCOGRA LogoNot only that, but every online game has to go through comprehensive testing, sometimes by a number of different independent bodies such as eCOGRA and GLI, to prove that the RNG is behaving as it has been described.

This happens to every slot, bingo game, or casino games on a regulated website, so you can be sure that every effort has been made to create a level playing field when producing these games.

That means whenever and wherever you play, you have as much chance of winning on your first ever ticket as someone else on a different site who is on their 100th ticket. You have as much chance of winning the next round even if you won the last three. It’s random.

Bingo Networks

Bingo Networks 2

Bingo Networks 1

If extra evidence were needed, it is simply not possible for the bingo website to cheat you even if they wanted to.

All bingo games run on a bingo network, and it is the network that builds, provides, and runs the games, not the bingo website. This is why you often see the same games available on different websites.

The website has no access to the game or how it works, the network does all that, the bingo site just market their brand and the games they have on offer.

What’s more, these bingo networks have to be licensed too, so as long as your site is licensed and regulated by the UKGC then so will the network be, and the network earns money by charging a fee to bingo sites/casinos that want to use their products, so it isn’t in their interests to fiddle the system either, even if they could get away with it which they can’t because of all of the testing and regulation.

Feel better? We hope so!